Jackie had now changed her tune, clinging to me as if she liked it. “I’m irresistible, brother, he’s swapping sides for me.” “I can’t fight it any longer,” I said, nonchalantly. Wade shook his head at us. “I’ll be sure to pass this ...
Half asleep, he wondered whether that might not have been his happiest day ever, the last, perfect day swelling with the immensity of his secret intent, secret creation—the day before everything changed—the day before he realized, for the first t...
The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was exci...
God’s forgiveness doesn’t come cheaply, nor is it a ticket to do what we jolly well please because there’s a get out of jail free card at the end. Instead, it is the life-changing embrace of love that welcomes us when we’ve no reason to expec...
Times like this were special. Memory builders. When something extraordinary happened to a person the kind of things remembered forever after it didn't have to be a life-changing event like a graduation or marriage or birth of a child. It more often w...
The boy was lying, fast asleep, on a rude bed upon the floor; so pale with anxiety, and sadness, and the closeness of his prison, that he looked like death; not death as it shews in shroud and coffin, but in the guise it wears when life has just depa...
It is one of those simple but beautiful paradoxes of life: When a person feels that he is truly accepted by another, as he is, then he is freed to move from there and to begin to think about how he wants to change, how we wants to grow, how he can be...
These young men, in other words, represented a variety of types, but one thing they had in common was that they'd all given up on committing positively to anything in life. This was not their fault, however. The blame lay with a certain ubiquitous sp...
It was always the same; other people gave up loving before she did. They got spoilt, or else they went away; in any case, they were partly to blame. Why did it happen so? She herself never changed; when she loved anyone, it was for life. She could no...
I want to tell her that this isn't 'love'. that 'love' doesn't stay the same, it changes like we do, it is shaped by our experiences, by what we do, who we meet, what we learn. I'd like to explain that falling in love now is not how it'll be forever,...
Once the Church denies her ontological identity-- what she really, essentially is as an existential event whereby individual survival is changed into a personal life of love and communion-- then from that very moment she is reduced to a conventional ...
What Walter thinks is that people are like rivers. We never stay in the same place but jest keep flowing along, learning new stuff and picking up new experiences and changing all the time. So today’s you isn’t the same as yesterday’s you and wo...
Don’t be adamant; don’t make up your mind about all the things that don’t even have anything at all to do with you. Don’t be too quick to define right and wrong. Life has a way of putting the adamant person into the very situations they’ve ...
Dinner is the most like jazz of all the meals, in that jazz is part form and part improvisation. You decide what you’re going to have, and then while you’re preparing it – because it’s the end of the day and you have the time – you have the...
I write because I have an innate need to. I write because I can't do normal work. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write be...
Lorenzo: A number of the inmates, as tough as they acted during the day, would often cry themself to sleep at night. There were other cries, too. Diffrent from those full with fear and lonelyness. They were low and muffled, the sounds of pain and ang...
Gru: [reading the book he wrote] One big unicorn, strong and free, thought he was happy as he could be. Then three little kittens came around and turned his whole life upside down. They made him laugh, they made him cry. He never should have said goo...
[Jack and Fabrizio are playing poker in a bar in front of the port] Jack: All right, the moment of truth. Somebody's life is about to change. Fabrizio? Niente. Fabrizio: Niente. Jack: Olaf? Nothing. Sven? Oh... two pairs. I'm sorry, Fabrizio. Fabrizi...
Merchant: [holding up an oil lamp] Do not be fooled by its commonplace appearance. Like so many things, it is not what is outside, but what is inside that counts. This is no ordinary lamp! It once changed the course of a young man's life; a young man...
Meeting writers is always so disappointing. I got over wanting to meet live writers quite a long time ago. There is this terrific book that has changed your life, and then you meet the author, and he has shifty eyes and funny shoes and he won't talk ...
