The vast majority of the populace would never think of setting themselves any deadlines for the achievement of their dreams. They may have a vague notion they will get older and that one day they will probably die, but it all seems a long way away, a...
Presently, out from the wrappings came a teapot, which caused her to clasp her hands with delight, for it was made in the likeness of a plump little Chinaman ... Two pretty cups with covers, and a fine scarlet tray, completed the set, and made one lo...
I spent the past two years fearing the worst, that I chose safe arms to hold me when his arms weren’t the arms I longed to be in, nor were they really safe. I thought it’s what I deserved. I thought I couldn’t belong in the arms I wanted to rea...
But I was always coming here. I though about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happ...
But I was always coming here. I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to hap...
Sometimes, when we are far from clocks and schedules, we can still recapture a lost sense of place-based time. On a relaxing camping trip or a long day outdoors, perhaps, we can slip back into the rhythm of the sun.
It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a ...
There's a great difficulty in making choices if you have any imagination at all. Faced with such a multitude of desireable choices, no one choice seems satisfactory for very long by comparison with the aggregate desirability of all the rest, though c...
Here then we are first to consider a book, presented to us by a barbarous and ignorant people, written in an age when they were still more barbarous, and in all probability long after the facts which it relates, corroborated by no concurring testimon...
In the dark, dank world of the Tunnels, I would call upon this memory. And there would be a flicker of candlelight. If only for a moment. I closed my eyes, as if my eyelids were the levers of a printing press, etching the fibers into my mind. Memorie...
Machineries of reason, machineries of conduct, machineries of virtue. The machine that regulates instinct, keeps one’s hands free of another man’s throat, free of one’s own. These machines have all, as someone said, gone too long in the element...
Now that you’re here, now that they know you exist, you’ll never be free again. Ever. We’re prisoners to our books, our fates planned long before we were born. You’re no different than us. Fight your fate all you want, but deep down you know ...
Maybe love was a myth anyhow, a brew of hormones and fantasy, evolution's way of getting men and women together long enough for them to procreate,back in the day when girls got pregnant at twelve, were pregnant or nursing for the next twenty years, a...
The person in love finds only a dream, a notion, an ideal. You fall in love with nothing but your own dreams—the only carriers of your true longings. Sometimes you manage to personify your dreams in another. Sometimes it’s not a single-player gam...
The shadow-past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by a smell, a word, a place, th...
At length the Lady Galadriel released them from her eyes, and she smiled. ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled,’ she said. ‘Tonight you shall sleep in peace.’ Then they sighed and felt suddenly weary, as those who have been questioned long and...
He took a long drink, then grimaced. “I do not have a drinking problem,” he announced, his voice needlessly loud. “I have a Churchillian relationship with alcohol: I can crack jokes and govern England and do anything I want to do. Except not dr...
We both just stood there. I let the breeze brush against my skin, the sun release the tension in my muscles. It was as close as I had felt to God in a long time. "It's like we're praying," Celeste whispered. "Only we're not saying anything.
How often had that hydrant even been opened? Did you jet water through a car window, what, twice at best? Summer burned just a few afternoons long, in the end. As for flying, Dose never even glanced at the sky. Flying was a summer within a summer, a ...
Still must the poet as of old, In barren attic bleak and cold, Starve, freeze, and fashion verses to Such things as flowers and song and you; Still as of old his being give In Beauty's name, while she may live, Beauty that may not die as long As ther...
So long as there is gold underneath, who cares about the dust on top? Literature! That old whore! We must try to dose her with mercury and pills and clean her out from top to bottom, she has been so ultra-screwed by filthy pricks!
