With Angela, everything about Damian died. His hopes, his dreams, his emotions. From that day on, Trey watched with regret, and a silent prayer to his sister, who he hoped looked down upon them. He wished that Damian would rediscover his humanity. He...
So I found myself telling my own stories. It was strange: as I did it I realised how much we get shaped by our stories. It's like the stories of our lives make us the people we are. If someone had no stories, they wouldn't be human, wouldn't exist. A...
Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy. Those who do not want mercy never seek it. It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of ...
Or is it the case that no one gets over anything? Is there really that much pain and suffering continuing right now at this minute, in millions of hearts, in bodies carrying on the burden of existence, trying to smile through tears for fleeting, pass...
In the immediate vicinity, there might well be stability and peace. In the garden, a breeze may be swaying the branches of the plum tree and dust may slowly be gathering on the bookshelves in the living room. But we are aware that such serenity does ...
To live in modernity--an era contemporaneous with the triumph of the news--is to be constantly reminded that, thanks to science and technology, change and improvement are continuous and relentless. This is part of the reason we must keep checking the...
You're going to throw me naked into a pit and make me drench myself in baby lotion, aren't you?" Bride You live in New Orleans, where they can't even dig a grave. So tell me where I'm going to find this pit?" Vane "It's an above ground pit." Bride "H...
I was recently living more comfortably surrounded by secrets... Like dozens of luxurious satiny pillows, they were embracing me from all directions into safe lulling warmth, thus isolating me from the sharp dead-cold edges of the truth hiding behind ...
On some such night as this she remembered promising to herself to live as brave and noble a life as any heroine she ever read or heard of in romance, a life sans peur et sans reproche; it had seemed to her then that she had only to will, and such a l...
We do not look for reason for logic in the passionate entreaties of those who are sick unto death; we are stung with the recollection of a thousand slighted opportunities of fulfilling the wishes of those who will soon pass away from among us: and do...
Jesus is dangerous to society, to the status quo, and to contemporary piety. This clarity of preaching cannot be allowed to continue. It is like a cold, a virus that infects all who suffer and who love under conditions that only worsen, in a world th...
In our heart we know that life loves life. Yet we feast on some of the other life-forms with which we share our planet; we kill to live. Taste is what carries us across that rocky moral terrain, what makes the horror palatable, and the paradox we cou...
If all the world spoke, acted, or kept silence with intent to deceive, --if dearest interests were at stake, and dearest lives in peril, --if no one should ever know of her truth or her falsehood to measure out their honour or contempt for her by, st...
When we seek from Zen (or from any spiritual path) the fulfillment of our fantasies, we separate from the earth and sky, from our loved ones, from our aching backs and hearts, from the very soles of our feet. Such fantasies insulate us for a time; ye...
May it not be that he loves chaos and destruction (there can be no disputing that he does sometimes love it) because he is instinctively afraid of attaining his object and completing the edifice he is constructing? Who knows, perhaps he only loves th...
Give more, so that we can build more, put interest in understanding another more in whatever actions one might carry out in life. Because we all are fighting for survival against adversaries and are sometimes falling, but if we stand together and hel...
From the girl who sat before me now...surged a fresh and physical life force. She was like a small animal that has popped into the world with the coming of spring. Her eyes moved like an independent organism with joy, laughter, anger, amazement, and ...
It’s the wide variation of women in our little shared petri dish that makes our lives never boring. Really all that we have in common is we each fell in love with a dude in uniform. The rest of it is a wild card. . . . Each of us trying to get thro...
Cookbooks, it should be stressed, do not belong in the kitchen at all. We keep them there for the sake of appearances; occasionally, we smear their pages together with vibrant green glazes or crimson compotes, in order to delude ourselves, and any pa...
As Miriam released my hand I felt that she and Midwife Bell had returned to a more primitive world, where men never intruded and even their role in conception was unknown. Here the chain of life was mother to daughter, daughter to mother. Fathers and...
I tried to save money by saving time and not showing up to work. I had more important things to do, like sleep. If I lived in Paris, I’d probably be considered a romantic, but since I’m an American I have to conceal my true identity with the labe...
