As I see the world, there's one element that's even more corrosive than missionaries: tourists. It's not that I feel above them in any way, but that the very places they patronize are destroyed by their affection.
Experience has taught me the power of trophies. You may have every knick-knack and useless contraption ever devised, but while they weigh you down, a simple trophy can go a long, long way.
They wouldn’t even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried i...
We all have our routines," he said softly."But they must have a purpose and provide an outcome that we can see and take some comfort from, or else they have no use at all. Without that, they are like the endless pacings of a caged animal. If they are...
Marriage is full of such cut-and-dry arrangements, Rhonda thought,then felt that small ache she sometimes got at the back of her skull-the one that told her she might be alone forever, not a fate that she chose but rather a fate that seemed to have b...
And as Rhonda told the story, she thought: this is how the past gets passed down. This is how memories are made. Half-invented, embellished, given a touch of whimsy. Daniel would be a saint now that he was dead. A beautiful man who made his child win...
On the one hand the younger son realizes that he has lost the dignity of his sonship, but at the same time that sense of lost dignity makes him also aware that he is indeed the son who had dignity to lose," (pp. 49).
I hold life sacred, even more since I’ve tasted freedom,... But I've lost my fear of death... But if you join me, I will gladly give my life for you. Because this land and its people have lost too much.
I thought: That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it. It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to...
Maria cries unashamedly on my shoulder while I whisper and pet her cheek, but Anastasia grips my other hand and stares fiercely back at our Alexander Palace with her wet blue eyes until it is no more than a lemon-colored speck against the sunrise.
My sisters and I sit together on a pair of suitcases. If we've forgotten anything, it's already too late -- our rooms have all been sealed and photographed. Anyway, Tatiana would say it's bad luck to return for something you've forgotten.
If two thousand five hundred languages are to be lost in the course of the twenty-first century, don’t be in any doubt about what that means for us: in each of those two thousand five hundreds cases a culture will be lost.
There are many different stories to tell. It's never the same. Every day weather blows in and out, alters the surface. Sometimes it is stripped down to a single essential truth, the thing that is always believed, no matter what. The seeds from which ...
There was a time, not so long ago, when Simon Lewis had been convinced that all gym teachers were actually demons escaped from some hell dimension, nourishing themselves on the agonies of uncoordinated youth. Little did he know he'd been almost right...
So often, she had found herself transported by music. She would get lost, lose herself to the time and fullness of the tones, the way it conjured up air around her as she listened or as she played. But this, she thought, one did not get lost in this ...
Kenzie took two staggering steps backward, staring at the feeline as if in a daze. "O-kay," she breathed, shaking her head slightly. "A cat. A cat that talks. I'm going crazy." she glanced at me. " Or you slipped something into my drink at the tourna...
For eventually one gets over reality’s affront to one’s innocence. One grows accustomed to the melancholy fact that we all sell ourselves at one time or another, that whoring is the dirty little secret of our success as human beings.
It may upset my secret sisters that I say this, but between you and me, if you're so fortunate as to have captured the perfect male, peeling off that chain-mail bikini and becoming a part-time Amazon is not so bad after all. -Author's Note, Anne Fort...
Don't tell anyone, but on the pagan day of the sun god Ra, I kneel at the foot of an ancient instrument of torture and consume ritualistic symbols of blood and flesh. ...And if any of you care to join me, come to the Harvard chapel on Sunday, kneel b...
The heaven-and-hell framework has four central elements: the afterlife, sin and forgiveness, Jesus’s dying for our sins, and believing.
Mogadishu the beautiful - your white-turbaned mosques, baskets of anchovies as bright as mercury, jazz and shuffling feet, bird-boned servant girls with slow smiles, the blind white of your homes against the sapphire blue of the ocean - you are misse...
