It is hard to be angry when one has seen the sun rise,' she said. It seems to be true,' he admitted. 'I wonder why.' Because it makes one feel so small and insignificant. It has been rising forever and will rise forever no matter what we do or do not...
People talk about books being an escape, but here on the tube, this one feels more like a lifeline...The motion of the train makes her head rattle, but her eyes lock on the words the way a figure skater might choose a focal point as she spins, and ju...
Katie hated “cutties” and her father’s miserable mutterings of sunken military submarines. She preferred her mother’s tales of her descendants – of legend farrago corn growers singing in shafts of golden sun, or of Rawhunt and Pocahontas ma...
Sam heard someone bellow in the distance, but the sound of freight trains running in his ears dampened the sound, making it impossible for him to locate the source of the cry. When he heard it sound again, closer, the voice sounded familiar somehow. ...
What hasty preperations we make for our future. Think of it: it seems almost tragic, the things we’re sure we ought to bring along. We pack too heavy with what we hope we’ll use, and too light of what we must. We thus go forth misladen, ill equip...
He has a light, fumbling brutality, which several times makes me think that this time it’ll cost me my sanity. In our dawning, mutual intimacy, I induce him to open the little slit in the head of his penis so I can put my clitoris inside and fuck h...
Until now, you have always lived your life alone. Every decision you’ve made has been for you and you alone. Now, and for the rest of your days, your life will be tied to another’s. Every decision you make will be for both of you. What one does a...
You do not believe in the magic and power of this book only because you cannot comprehend that it is possible. The lack of faith of your part does not make the power less capable or less real...You only have to open up your mind to the possibilities....
I'd never felt so helpless - so hopeless - in my life as I did there. To be completely under someone's power, with no one to turn to for help, to make someone feel like they're at fault for you hurting them . . . I realized that was exactly what I'd ...
It was his fault, all of it, and yet her hatred for him was the worst kind of love, a tortured longing, a misguided wish that made her heart hammer in her chest. She couldn't ignore the disjointed sensation that they were now two different pieces of ...
I was well aware how famously or infamously secretive these old institutions can be, no more than ourselves, a mixture of worry, lost power, perhaps even concern. That the truth may not always be desirable, that one thing leads to another thing, that...
Max Weber was right in subscribing to the view that one need not be Caesar in order to understand Caesar. But there is a temptation for us theoretical sociologists to act sometimes as though it is not necessary even to study Caesar in order to unders...
People like to say love is unconditional, but it's not, and even if it was unconditional, it's still never free. There's always an expectation attached. They always want something in return. Like they want you to be happy or whatever and that makes y...
Every single day, no matter who you meet in the day - friends, family, work colleagues, strangers - give joy to them. Give a smile or a compliment or kind words or kind actions, but give joy! Do your best to make sure that every single person you mee...
I stare at the pile of discarded remnants and think of my mother. Did she touch that pillar there? Does her scent still linger in a fragment of glass or a splinter of wood? A terrible emptiness settles into my chest. No matter how much I go about liv...
I admit that I myself am far from having a complete command of every topic I touch on, but my knowledge of my subject is always greater than the interest or the understanding of my auditors. You see, there is one very good thing about mankind; the me...
You can't kill an idea the way they try to. You can keep it down awhile, but sooner or later it'll come out. Now what you've got to understand is that the wheel's not evil. Never mind what the scared men all tell you. no discovery is good or evil unt...
There will always be reservations, things one must leave out, events one can’t explain without handing over a full map of one’s life, unfolding it, making clear that all the lines and contours stand for long days and nights when things were bad o...
You understand nothing," I told him with a weary shake of the head, but I would not try to make him understand. That there was no justification for it: the murder of another, no matter how vile. We had all been wrong and, blackest of ironies, I had k...
His lips are familiar. I know the shape of them, know how to make mine fit against them. His taste is familiar too. For all the illusions and colors and sweet smells... he has always tasted like skin. His breaths are shallow. I'm holding his life aga...
Other people are, as a rule, so immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, m...
