We live during a time in which some shoppers shiver all Thanksgiving night only to trample one another to death in a sunrise race through the electronics store to buy gaming consoles that allow them to create avatars of themselves.
There is something about the act of studying an unclothed body, as an artist does, that allows a person to appreciate it as pure form, regardless of the kinds of traits traditionally regarded as imperfections. In a figure drawing class, an obese woma...
Secularization—that is, the gradual conformity of our thinking, beliefs, commitments, and practices to the pattern of this fading age—is not just something that happens to the church; it is something that happens in the church. In fact, it’s di...
Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age of relentless humiliations—that we are more than ourselves; th...
You know how to make turkey? How would you have learnt that?" From what I knew, most dhampirs stayed nearly year-round at their schools from an early age. Not a lot of culinary time. "Hey," he said, straight-faced. "All knowledge is worth having." Ji...
A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age ... pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don't want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, An...
After that [father's death] I never cried with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyone's God except indifference, nor loved deeply without fear that it would cost me dearly in pain. At the age of five I had become a skeptic and began to sens...
Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral...
Paying attention is more important to reliability than moving slowly. Because he pays close attention, a Navy pilot can land a 40,000 lb. aircraft at 140 miles per hour on a pitching carrier deck, at night, more safely than the average teenager can c...
Why did they believe? Because they saw miracles. Things one man took as chance, a man of faith took as a sign. A loved one recovering from disease, a fortunate business deal, a chance meeting with a long lost friend. It wasn't the grand doctrines or ...
I don't have much time for stories," Vin said. "Seems that fewer and fewer people do, these days." A canopy kept off the ash, but he seemed unconcerned about the mists. "It makes me wonder what is so alluring about the real world that gives them all ...
What kind of woman is still able to trust people after everything she's been through? If she'd been Vin, she would have stabbed him in the back at the first opportunity, and that would have probably been the right thing to do. Yet, this girl just con...
We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than the one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt. The fashion of the age has identified mental ...
Since Mom wasn't exactly the most useful person in the world, one lesson I learned at an early age was how to get things done, and this was a source of both amazement and concern for Mom, who considered my behavior unladylike but also counted on me. ...
But this you must know: the violent murder of a mother- when a boy is at the tender age, when he is just discovering girls- it is a terrible thing. confusingly mixed up with all the things feminine, it leaves a charred residue on the soul, like the b...
I do not declare that I have no intention of marrying on any general principle. If I were to see the right man, no doubt I should eat my words with a ready appetite. The simple fact is, I have never seen him yet, and at the age of thirty, reason incl...
Heritage was everything: it was a golden skeleton key, gleaming with power, able to get the wielder through any number of locked doors; it was the christening of the marriage bed with virgin blood on snow-white sheets; it was the benediction of a pri...
I know my father blamed himself, since he is the one who discovered me pawing through his pornography in the basement as a child. Even then, I marveled at the strangeness of the women in the magazines, their hair feathered in a style I struggled to b...
If you aren’t ready, you spend your whole life perseverating on that one situation, getting it wrong time and again. I like to think I am a woman who learns her lesson, but the trick is that you can only ever understand your life backwards, but you...
When you have dogs, you witness their uncomplaining acceptance of suffering, their bright desire to make the most of life in spite of the limitations of age and disease, their calm awareness of the approaching end when their final hours come. They ac...
[M]ay not literature (and, in particular, fiction) be considered a desperate and permanently thwarted effort to produce a unique form of expression? Something like a cry, perhaps, a cry that, somehow, inexplicably contains all the millions of words t...
