She looked at the produce stalls, a row of jewels in a case, the colors more subtle in the winter, a Pantone display consisting only of greens, without the raspberries and plums of summer, the pumpkins of autumn. But if anything, the lack of variatio...
Marry, don't marry,' Auntie Aya says as we unfold layers of dough to make an apple strudel. Just don't have your babies unless it's .' How do I know if it's necessary?' She stops and stares ahead, her hands gloved in flour. 'Ask yourself, Do I want a...
Or, God, maybe this was just life. For everyone on the planet. Maybe the Survivor's Club wasn't something you "earned," but simply what you were born into when you came out of your mother's womb. Your heartbeat put you on the roster and then the rest...
Every now and then, I’d meet a guy and think that we were getting along great, and suddenly I’d stop hearing from him. Not only did he stop calling, but if I happened to bump into him sometime later he always acted like I had the plague. I didn�...
There are many lay people and scholars alike, both with and without the Muslim community, who feel that the pure orthodox Islam of the fundamentalists could never survive outside the context of its seventh-century Arabian origins. Apply twenty-first-...
The Challenge is to pry Bertie loose from Dain and his circle of oafish dengenerates,” Jessica said severely. “It would be far more profitable to pry Dain loose for yourself,” said her grandmother. “He is very wealthy, his lineage is excellen...
What exists beneath the sea? I’d always pictured it in colors of emerald and aquamarine, where black velvet fish with sequined eyes swim among plankton. But, when my eyes adjust, I see gray stones, lost anchors, wet wood, buttons, hooks, and eyes, ...
Floating there I held onto faith. Because you can't know who might cross your path or who will take your breath away. You can't know what friends might actually become sisters because they stayed by your side. You can't know when there'll be an unexp...
But he was no longer in Tollygunge. He had stepped out of it as he had stepped so many mornings out of his dreams, its reality and its particular logic rendered meaningless in the light of day. The difference was so extreme that he could not accommod...
If this letter system works, it should be reproducible and consistent. If this letter system works, it should be demonstrated in biblical narrative—with consistency. It has. It does. It will. For instance: Daniel interpreted the handwriting on the ...
Stars, too, were time travelers. How many of those ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead? How many had been born but their light not yet come this far? If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it ta...
Now we cannot...discover our failure to keep God's law except by trying our very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really try, whatever we say there will always be at the back of our minds the idea that if we try harder next time we shall succeed...
Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call 'humble' nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is ...
The men her girlfriends dated were too often angry and muttering about oppression. One of the reasons she took to Skeet later in life was that he never went to that place; he believed with a firm positivity that he didn't need to waste time resenting...
I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend...I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, an...
But writing is a queer business. If one does anything that is sharp and keep enough to go over the line, to get itself with the work that is taken seriously, one has to have had either an unusual knowledge of or a peculiar sympathy with the character...
Sometimes I feel she hasn't left...especially when I wear the photo charm necklace with her picture in it. I can't tell you how many young men have stared into that picture and the reaction is always the same: a slow beam rises across their faces and...
I wonder if he practices making awkward and nerdy look sort of cool. Like he fills his house with furniture that is the wrong scale for his tall body and buys plaid shirts in bulk and tells his barber to leave crazy, too-long pieces of hair mixed in ...
I'm terrified of getting involved with someone who disappoints me or leaves me empty and alone. I'm terrified of rejection, so I set my expectations so high that they can never be met, and I dig around with a magnifying glass looking for flaws in ver...
I've found that when you're wrapped up in the process of dating and want so badly to have something work out with someone -anyone- it's easy to forget that your choices aren't limited to one person or the other. There's also the choice I always forge...
Art is a kind of magic. Creativity is mysterious, even to artists, who might be able to name their inspiration but can't always explain how their influences and experiences came together to create this new thing- this painting, this story, this song....
