There were a lot of these middle-aged single types in the neighborhood, shipwrecked by every kind of catastrophe, but she was one of the few who didn't have children, who lived alone, who was still kinda young. Something must have happened, your moth...
And a ride in a hearse tells us we’re all close to that final cruise . . . when the body dies and we move on. It’s just the body, man. It’s just the body. The soul’s already gone. So don’t be afraid of a dead body absent a soul. It’s empt...
Loving cats wasn’t like loving skiing or comic books or arthouse films: when you walked into a pub, you usually didn’t feel the need to tell people about it, either stylistically or verbally. I didn’t try to hide the fact that I liked cats, it ...
He was to become the lawmaker for the poor and the downtrodden and the oppressed. He was to be the bearer of at least a measure of social justice to those whom social justice had so long been denied. The restorer of at least a measure of dignity to t...
During my three seasons at Mount Rainier I learned a lot about mountain climbing and rescues, about politics and camaraderie in the mountains, and about what being a woman climber means. Now I know in all certainty when to bring my toothbrush and whe...
Joshua tried to find the right words to explain how things were--how they'd always been. "It's like... prairie dogs." Ben quirked an eyebrow at him. "You see the holes. 'N' you know the dogs are around, even if you don't see the dogs themselves." "Wh...
It sounds like a lot when you summarize it, but I don't do all of it every day. If you want to know the truth, most days I feel like I'm miserably behind and only doing about half of what I should be doing. But when you look back you can see that you...
He takes the beer and sets it on the floor. "I've never been into guys. So, this attraction to you is a little weird for me." I try to ease his mind by telling him that a lot of straight guys have at least one homosexual experience in their lifetime ...
Lea found that she was saying things, saying them pretty loudly, but had no clear concept of what she was saying. [Sean and Andy’s] names, maybe. The seventy-two names of God. The capitals of all fifty states. Love. That word featured in there a lo...
One of the things that baffles me (and there are quite a few) is how there can be so much lingering stigma with regards to mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder. In my opinion, living with manic depression takes a tremendous amount of balls. ...
It seems to me that we can’t explain all the truly awful things in the world like war and murder and brain tumors, and we can’t fix these things, so we look at the frightening things that are closer to us and we magnify them until they burst open...
Even now when I'm furious, what I would like to do is to punch the infuriating person flat on the ground. That solves nothing I know, and I spent a lot of time understanding my own violence, which is not of the pussycat kind. There are people who cou...
When it's summer, people sit a lot. Or lie. Lie in the sense of recumbency. A good heavy book holds you down. It's an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic. Many a person has been saved from summer alcoholism, not to ...
Stupid women were lured into it and assured they would become young and beautiful if they let themselves be pummeled and pounded and smeared with sticky creams, and have their faces lifted and their stomachs flattened. They paid a lot of money to Mad...
Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to shar...
I have a lot of boo-boos, cowboy." "Maybe I should kiss them." He leaned forward, brushed his lips against her forehead, just above the stitches over her eyebrow. She held up her arm where there was an abrasion. "Hurts here too." He kissed the spot. ...
This doll-guy situation is an extreme of what I deal with in everyday life, where men believe that what they want I want, and they project that on to me and then blame me, curse me, when I don’t respond the way they’ve fantasized, like it’s som...
A person can learn a lot from a dog, even a loopy one like ours. Marley taught me about living each day with unbridled exuberance and joy, about seizing the moment and following your heart. He taught me to appreciate the simple things-a walk in the w...
(Q: From an outsider’s perspective, what you call “chaos magick” has a lot of rules, discipline, and order involved, and doesn’t seem very chaotic at all. What would you say to such a person?) A: I differentiate sternly between Chaos and Entr...
People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise you’d never be confident of things like ‘My wife loves me’. But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the day w...
My basic profession is as an actor, and I have learnt much about life through working as an actor. Working as an actor is really a spiritual profession, since it means to create life on the stage. It means to play a role totally, while at the same ti...
