Somebody left a pair of baby shoes on a bench. I would have taken them home, if only they weren’t too big for my feet.
Everything hurt. I closed my eyes, pressing my cheek to the street, and waited. What for, I didn't know. To be rescued. Or found. But no one came. All I'd ever thought I wanted was to be left alone. Until I was.
Because that is what happens when you try to run from the past. It doesn't just catch up: it overtakes, blotting out the future, the landscape, the very sky, until there is no path left except that which leads through it.
Extreme right-wingers are known for giving God a bad name; extreme left-wingers are known for giving God a weak name. He's not as simple as conservative versus liberal, old versus new. His wings are balanced. God is both and neither.
Of course. That's what people do in a disordered world, a world of freedom and choice: they leave when they want. They disappear, they come back, they leave again. And you are left to pick up the pieces on your own.
She'd known the guy a grand total of five minutes and he'd already left her a sour first impression. The last thing she ought to be doing right now was ogling his six-pack.
These are people who accept the fire of the Holy Spirit,' he said, 'the fire that is left behind but that is used by so few people to light their candles.
Now more than ever I wish I had a cup of oblivion. But there is no mercy for the people who have left the darkness for the light. The darkness lingers until you stand naked in the light and let it fill you up, in every corner of your soul.
He turns back to me, a strong hand swooping down and sculpting hair off my face, familiar looking arms curling back around me and cradling me into a chest harder and hotter than a mountain left baking in the Australian outback.
Pulling back, like a savage carnivore at its prey, it tore a large chunk of meat rendering his left arm useless...regardless he did not require it for long.
What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin - when we're dancing with our own skeletons - our words might be all that's left of us.
This is much easier than when N left. Our son is unable to grasp and simultaneously turn doorknobs yet. If only this trick could be unlearned by men over thirty, many more families would celebrate Christmas together.
True, science has conquered many diseases, broken the genetic code, and even placed human beings on the moon, and yet when a man of eighty is left in a room with two eighteen-year-old cocktail waitresses nothing happens.
With women who do not love us, as with the "dear departed," the knowledge that there is no hope left does not prevent us from continuing to wait.
Women always bring it back to the personal,' said Handsome. 'It's why you can't be world leaders.' 'And men never do,' I said, 'which is why we end up with no world left to lead.
It seemed to Rosa Lublin that the whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret. Everyone had left behind a real life. Here they had nothing. They were all scarecrows, blown about under the murdering sunball with empty ribcages.
I began to feel that all the people I'd ever known who had died or left me had not in fact gone away, but continued to live on inside me just as this man's wife lived on inside him.
Frederick left the young couple gazing into each other’s eyes. Revolting, the way otherwise sensible people could carry on, he decided. Something to do with being married, no doubt. Perhaps it damaged the brain.
When they came it was as if the lord of the world had arrived, and had brought all the glories of its kingdoms along; and when they went they left a calm behind which was like the deep sleep which follows an orgy.
So you killed him with what now?" "I tried that Dr. Phil book at first"..."And I finished it off with the toilet seat. Just so you know, you left it up again. That drives me crazy.
Alcoholism or addiction is a disease because it fits the definition of disease. It is progressive and chronic, and left untreated, it will kill.
