We came around the corner and stood in the doorway of what looked like a paint-testing ground. This was where we proved once and for all that we were good loving parents. We decided to let him live. "What is painting doing in my best Tupperware bowl?...
We lie under the sheet after making love, speaking of loneliness relieved in a book relived in a book so on that page the clot and fissure of it appears words of a man in pain a naked word entering the clot a hand grasping through bars: deliverance W...
Children see God every day; they just don't call it that. It's the summer sky painted with cumulus clouds by day and sequined with a million stars by night. It's the sweet whispers of sweet gum trees and the sounds riding the tops of honeysuckle-scen...
You cannot always depend on prayers to be answered the way you want them answered but you can always depend on God. God, the loving Father often denies us those things which in the end would prove harmful to us. Every boy wants a revolver at age four...
That was what stuck in the craws of all the good women of Deptford: Mrs Dempster had not been raped, as a decent woman would have been—no, she had yielded because a man wanted her. The subject was not one that could be freely discussed even among i...
Did you finish yours, Kota?" "Working on it now, Actually." "How's it going?" He sat up, turning in his chair and holding up his notebook. "I don't know. What rhymes with formaldehyde?" My eyes widened. Gabriel laughed, rubbing his fingers against hi...
The death of these people might have changed the world, Grace, so we might have changed the world, Grace, so we sometimes have to look at death not as something sad, but as something to be glad for. Sometimes death changes our lives in ways we never ...
I’m not a violent person, Sydney. Not at all. I’ll make love over war any day. But I swear, if they’d hurt you—” “They didn’t,” I said firmly. I refused to let him know how scared I’d been because I was afraid he might go after them...
To look deep into your child's eyes and see in him both yourself and something utterly strange, and then to develop a zealous attachment to every aspect of him, is to achieve parenthood's self-regarding, yet unselfish, abandon. It is astonishing how ...
The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends. Where the truthful answer to the question "Do you see the same truth?" would be "I see nothing and I don't care about the truth; I only want a Friend," no Fri...
I've always loved strong women, which is lucky for me because once you're over about twenty-five there is no other kind. Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and k...
She understood now that while it had been wrong to kill Cansrel, it had also been right. The boy with the strange eyes had helped her to see the rightness of it. The boy who'd killed Archer. Some people had too much power and too much cruelty to live...
I tried to imagine him capital-S Somewhere as we prayed, but even then I could not quite convince myself that he and I would be together again. I already knew too many dead people. I knew that time would now pass for me differently then it would for ...
That’s where thinking started, where thinking stopped, where all her prayers so long ago had dried up. She no longer prayed, nor even dreamed of changing her father. Her dreams now played variations on the theme of escape. And they were nothing mor...
...And then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light becau...
How is it?" I ask as we stroll towards the dressing rooms. "Working at the playground. That must be fun." "Sure, they're just adorable," she says, "For the first five minutes. And then I want to wring their adorable little necks." I stop, shocked. "I...
There was a magic about the sea. People were drawn to it. People wanted to love by it, swim in it, play in it, look at it. It was a living thing that as as unpredictable as a great stage actor: it could be calm and welcoming, opening its arms to embr...
I could see the cat was definitely on the steps. Still on the steps, 20 minutes after Carl's call. This was strange; Amy loved the cat. The cat was declawed, the cat was never let outside, , because the cat ... was sweet, but extremely stupid. ... Am...
Don’t let “reality” make you lose faith in God and gain faith in Man. Don’t put your Joy in man because when man leaves, there goes your Joy. The world didn’t give you your joy and the world can’t take it away. Your value isn’t in the h...
The only other person I have fallen in love with that way is Jesus, and I hope that goes more smoothly. I hope I remember, when I'm bored with Him, and antsy, and sick of brushing my teeth next to the same god every morning, I hope I remember not to ...
I once had a published written debate with a religious apologist who, after I had argued the standard line that the idea of a loving and merciful deity is inconsistent with the fact of natural evil, said this meant his god was not all-powerful, and t...
