Whoever wants the "I" to yield up its mysterious and tremendous secret must stop it from looking perpetually in the mirror, must stop the little ego's fascination with its own image.
The wave is the signature of every experience of life. By understanding the nature of waves and their characteristics, and applying that understanding to our lives, we can navigate life with a little more grace.
The kind of president we need has little to do with ideology and more to do with a willingness to wield power to moral ends.
Peace would always be less compelling than war. Perhaps that was why there was so little of it in the world. (p. 160)
Who was there to guard youth from pain and death - youth who could not, who had never been able to, guard itself? Did they know too little? Or was it that they knew too much, and therefore thought they knew it all?
They're horrible little creatures. All snot and smelly feet and pestering questions." "Then why did you go into teaching?" "It was either that or sit at home with Mother all day. I picked the lesser of two evils.
Deciding which relationships to pursue can be difficult. Especially if you’re trying to get hired by the Magic 8 Ball factory and that little triangle thing isn't floating right.
What should I say? ‘Well, the murder was a little upsetting, and the fire did worry me a bit. I was nearly date-raped and my ex best friend is crazy. But, hey, at least I’m making an A in History’?
After all, she is lucky. I have been much too calm these past three years. I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity. I leave.
[...]And his head is on fire with new things[...]he called himself the little blue hermit, scuttling across the sand in search of a new shell, but now he looks at the sky and knows that no shell will ever be big enough, ever.
If you love too much, you lose yourself. If you love too little, you never find yourself.
Making love to me is amazing. Wait, I meant: making love, to me, is amazing. The absence of two little commas nearly transformed me into a sex god.
For me and the girls from my village, horror is a disease and we are sick with it. It is not an illness you can cure yourself of by standing up and letting the big red cinema seat fold itself up behind you.
He had never seen her body so abandoned, so unconscious of all but the desire to be taken and satisfied. She bloomed under his caresses, no longer the girl but the woman already being born.
The cattle crouched round them in soft shadowy clumps, placidly munching, and dreaming with wide-open eyes. The narrow zone of colour created by the firelight was like the planet Earth - a little freak of brightness in a universe of impenetrable shad...
elliptical, adj. The kiss I like the most is one of the slow ones. It’s as much breath as touch, as much no as yes. You lean in from the side, and I have to turn a little to make it happen.
On a world where a common table implement is a little device with which you crack the ice that has formed on your drinnk between drafts, hot beer is a thing you come to appreciate.
He had a reputation in society as a man with a lively wit, whose gaiety was pleasant and formidable – which all gaiety must be in a society which would despise you if, while amusing it, you did not make it tremble a little. ("A Woman's Vengeance")
If there's—one person on the face of this earth who makes me sick it's the ninny who calls a thing 'improbable' because it happens to be outside his own special, puny experience of life.
...Mr. Hardie had little patience with that sort of conversation."Ye're born, ye suffer, and ye die. What made ye think ye deserved different?" he wondered aloud when the deacon's gentle answers failed to quiet them.
So curious you must be. Like little calves poking their heads through the fence with big eyes and a headful of curiosity.
