Technology won’t protect you from being attacked for fresh water. A badass blade will. Back in Eden where I grew up, the closest thing to knifework I’d experienced was cutting up a loaf of warm bread. Last night, I’d gutted a wild prairie chick...
I am one of those lucky marvels whose husband has banned them from the kitchen, the last and now permanent ban was during an Everton Three (door slamming on hand) when he’d lamented, in a crazed manner to no one in particular after my failed tomato...
In this ever-changing society, the most powerful and enduring brands are built from the heart. They are real and sustainable. Their foundations are stronger because they are built with the strength of the human spirit, not an ad campaign. The compani...
I don't understand how people can stand next to you one year,and next year, they cannot. They're going crazy, screaming. They can't take it that you're there. But last year I was in the same club,walking around,lonely like a motherfucker. Couldn't ge...
...[E]ven I know that being a parent is awful ninety-five percent of the time...As far as I can tell, it's that last five percent that keeps the human race from dying out. Four parts blinding terror, one part perfection. It's like mainlining heroin. ...
And now if you'll excuse me, I should like to finish my book, alone, without the presence of a single ringleted girl to disrupt me. If you should come for me at dinner and find me in my chair, gone to the angels at last, you shall know that I died al...
You stayed around your children as long as you could, inhaling the ambient gold shavings of their childhood, and at the last minute you tried to see them off into life and hoped that the little piece of time you’d given them was enough to prevent t...
God forgives us, as—when—we forgive them who injure us—and ourselves. These last weeks I think I have understood what many times in the past I thought I knew—but we never know—we never reach the end of understanding—the understanding of G...
He had no secrets left. No defenses. He had nothing, except that same vast, dark, empty, infinite ache that had resided in him for as long as he could remember. An endless flight of stairs, leading down and down into the cold, dark pit of his soul. N...
She’s beautiful, but she’s also got brains. I’ll bet zombies would love to eat out of her skull like a bowl of Jell-O that had an IQ of 180—which is absurd, because the last bowl of Jell-O I ate only measured in with an IQ of 123. Still, an I...
Last year I built a Courage Machine, but I thought it might be noisy and was too afraid to turn it on. So I coated it with glue, covered it with cat hair, mounted it on my wall, and started claiming it was an exotic animal I killed on a Safari in Afr...
While lunch and conversation lasted roughly an hour, not at all a lot of time, I came away feeling like I’d known Zach for years. It was as if we’d grown up together and we’d been best friends since high school, which is ridiculous because in h...
I had a dream about you last night. We started a shoe company, and a competitor (probably someone from Nike) attacked you, so I had to stab them in the throat with a shoelace. I guess it would have been better to use that shoelace to strangle them. �...
He could see the tall, peeling yellow building at the periphery of his range of vision. But something about it struck him as strange. A shimmer, an unsteadiness, as if the building faded forward into stability and then retreated into insubstantial un...
How not to search that space where, for a time span lasting from dusk to dawn, two beings have no other reason to exist than to expose themselves totally to each other- totally, integrally, absolutely- so that their common solitude may appear not in ...
Idiot - A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot's activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but "pervades and regulates the whole." He has t...
The last achievement of the serious admirer is to stop immediately putting to work the energies aroused by, filling up the space opened by, what is admired. Thereby talented admirers give themselves permission to breathe, to breathe more deeply. But ...
The regrets about all she had let go flooded her. Where had all that enterprise gone? All that energy? Why had she never traveled? Or had more sex when she could? She had bleached and annihilated every waking moment of the last twenty years. Anything...
They meet in the girls' bathroom. The last time they were forced to meet in a place like this, they took separate, isolated stalls. Now they share one. They hold each other in the tight space, making no excuses for it. There's no time left in their l...
Everything that rises will fall. Empires, societies, governments. None of them lasts forever. Why? Because even though they are the products of change, they become resistant to change. The longer a society survives, the more it clings to its power, a...
And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.
