Not shy at all. I just don’t think this is the time or place to remind you how beautiful you looked on your knees in that little curtained alcove, sucking me off and daring me not to make a sound. Ah, see there ya go, shuttering those eyes as if I ...
Here's a funny question: What is your favorite word? Think about it—maybe it's a word that makes you absolutely happy, or a word that sounds gloriously beautiful, or a word that evokes awe and wonder. Maybe you are reminded of a great time when you...
Relief is a great feeling. It’s the emotional and physical reward we receive from our bodies upon alleviation of pain, pressure and struggle. A time to bask in the lack of the negative. And yet, think about it—relief is really the , a negation of...
What if the preacher or father’s saying ‘Someone here’s lost and hopeless’ was tantamount to those Sun-Times horoscopes that are specially designed to be so universally obvious that they always give their horoscope readers that special eerie ...
If you eat healthily most of the time you can afford to indulge yourself occasionally, but if you eat nothing but junk, you’ll end up not being able to run for a bus without huffing like a steam train. (The only drawback to being super-fit is that ...
The most interesting of the classic movie genres to me are the indigenous ones: the Western, which was born on the Frontier, the Gangster Film, which originated in the East Coast cities, and the Musical, which was spawned by Broadway. They remind me ...
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...
I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim—so modestly and so humbly—to possess. It is time to w...
On hearing himself called Polendina for the third time, Geppetto lost his head with rage and threw himself upon the carpenter. Then and there they gave each other a sound thrashing. After this fight, Mastro Antonio had two more scratches on his nose,...
And then it was, that grief and pain made themselves known to me as never before. Note this, because I knew the full absurdity of Fate and Fortune and Nature more truly than a human can bear to know it. And perhaps the description of this, brief as i...
It had to unleash some invisible magic, he thought; Hades and Persephone, joining together again within these black and holy stone walls, for the first time in millennia. As they indulged in enjoying one another, how could they not be reactivating so...
In a world so empty of human life, there was comfort in the thought that an invisible realm of spirits was aware of their existence, cared about their actions, and perhaps directed their steps. Even a stern or inimical spirit who cared enough to dema...
The pleasure of sport was so often the chance to indulge the cessation of time itself--the pitcher dawdling on the mound, the skier poised at the top of a mountain trail, the basketball player with the rough skin of the ball against his palm preparin...
Every time he studied this instrument, with its slender, gleaming steel rod that tapered down to such needle-like sharpness, he wondered why it was necessary to have things like this in the world. If it were truly only for chopping ice, you'd think a...
Suddenly, over the slope, as if tethered to a cord of air drawing quickly upward, came a Northern Harrier, motionless but for its rising. So still was the bird - wings, tail, head - it might have been a museum specimen. Then, as if atop the wind, it ...
To the Jacobins of this epoch [the French Revolution], as well as to those of our times, this popular entity constitutes a superior personality possessing attributes peculiar to the gods of never having to answer for their actions and never making a ...
Whatever the reason we first mustered the _Apollo_ program, however mired it was in Cold War nationalism and the instruments of death, the inescapable recognition of the unity and fragility of the Earth is its clear and luminous dividend, the unexpec...
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...
So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading -- about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it's going badly, when book...
She's Warrick's sister," he said, aiming to sound disapproving and very nearly managing it. "Yeah, and that's why you want to screw her. Because they have that weird identical twin thing going on, even though they aren't." Her eyes narrowed. "In fact...
Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at the same time. He is isolated among his contemporaries by truth and by his art, but with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will ...
