I wrote the last sentence of in early April and stumbled out of my apartment and into the beautiful spring feeling panicked and amazed. There is no single experience in my life as a writer to match that moment, the blue of the sky and the breeze drif...
You’re a people pleaser, aren’t you? You’re the type that can’t stand someone not liking you and showing it.” Raising his head, he laughed openly now. “That’s just...” I wanted to take a book from the shelf beside me and throw it at h...
Harriet, to hide her excitement, had turned to the bookshelves in the corner between the windows and the fireplace. The books, untidily arranged, some standing, some piled on their sides, with newspapers and magazines wedged among them, confused her....
No doubt you've experienced something similar in books, movies, novels–whatever you use as an excuse to get away, to suspend reality. Literary characters, like these projections, draw you in and cultivate feelings of friendship on your part. Althou...
I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that wou...
DESDEMONA: I hope my noble lord esteems me honest. OTHELLO: Oh, ay, as summer flies are in the shambles, That quicken even with blowing. O thou weed, Who art so lovely fair and smell’st so sweet That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne'er ...
You know how they say that right before you die your life flashes before your eyes? It doesn’t. That is just a notion they came up with for books and movies to make death seem romantic. Here’s what really happens: Your intestines feel like a dish...
I read a lot of travel books before I came here. Fantasised what it would be like. I read Scott’s journal. Those last entries as they froze to death in that tent. ‘Had we lived, I should have made a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and co...
If the gooseberry said: 'I haven't the heart to be a real proper gooseberry because if everyone were a gooseberry the world wouldn't continue to exist' this would be a stupid argument and the world would be deprived of a useful fruit. If you are call...
The book that simply demands to be read, for no good reason, is asking us to change our lives by putting aside what we usually think of as good reasons. It's asking us to stop calculating. It's asking us to do something for the plain old delight and ...
Thinking, not for the first time, that life should come with a trapdoor. Just a little exit hatch you could disappear through when you´d utterly and completely mortified yourself. Or when you had spontaneous zit eruptions. “Good book?” he asked,...
The DSM-IV-TR is a 943-page textbook published by the American Psychiatric Association that sells for $99...There are currently 374 mental disorders. I bought the book...and leafed through it...I closed the manual. "I wonder if I've got any of the 37...
Seeing God is all about getting in touch with reality. If you want to photograph God, focus your lens on Hamakom, The Place, anyplace where you see divine light illuminating reality. Let your camera collect the light reflecting from the reality shapi...
J.R.R.Tolkien has confessed that about a third of the way through The Fellowship of the Ring, some ruffian named Strider confronted the hobbits in an inn, and Tolkien was in despair. He didn't know who Strider was, where the book was going, or what t...
In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time -- none, zero. You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads--and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I'm a book with a coupl...
Yet Katie held fast to the dream that perhaps there were men in the world who appreciated good women - men capable of loving a woman enough to die for her. Something had to inspire the heroes in fairy tales and books. Her Aunt Augusta always said it ...
I don't mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way--characters saying things people never say, doing jobs that don't fit, the whole works--is simply asking too much of a reader. Something happening in a phony way must beat...
People listening to songs are like people reading novels: for a few minutes, for a few hours, someone else gets to come in and hijack that part of your brain that's always thinking. A good book or song kidnaps your interior voice and does all the dri...
His disheveled appearance could not hide his attractive qualities. And at first sight she could have sworn she'd come upon a character from one of her books¬¬—the gallant prince turned pirate. Perhaps it was his tall, strong form and unshaven fac...
Some men escape the grip. Maybe their wives have no social ambitions; maybe they've hit a sentence or two in a 'dangerous book' that pleased them; maybe they started on the treadmill as I did and were knocked off. Anyway, they're the congressmen you ...
It was spring, not winter or autumn, Paul thought with some lingering confusion. He listened to the layered murmur of wind against leaves, familiarly and gently disorienting as a terrestrial sound track, reminding people of their own lives, then open...
