No, it was simply that I was uninterested in making, as I saw it, a Xerox of some old emotional state. I was in my mid-thirties, with a marriage more or less behind me. I was no longer vulnerable to curiosity's enormous momentum. I had nothing new to...
I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowe...
Why?" she screamed. "Are you crazy? You know the English subjunctive, you understand trigonometry, you can read Marx, and you don't know the answer to something as simple as that? Why do you even have to ask? Why do you have to make a girl SAY someth...
Being in a hurry. Getting to the next thing without fully entering the thing in front of me. I cannot think of a single advantage I've ever gained from being in a hurry. But a thousand broken and missed things, tens of thousands, lie in the wake of a...
And yet on that bench at Jacobacci, I was glad I had left everyone else behind. Although this was a town with a main street and a railway station, and people with dogs and electric lights it was near enough to the end of the earth to give me the impr...
When the laundry is for the dozen arms of children or the dozen legs, it's true, I think I'm due some appreciation. So comes a storm of trouble and lightning strikes joy. But when Christ is at the center, when dishes, laundry, work, is my song of tha...
Cole - I just thought of a new game. Jaz - What's that? Cole - Splat the Specter. Jaz - Rules? Cole - You can help me make them up. Right now all I know for sure is that it involves water guns filled with grape Kool-Aid and two ferrets named Biff and...
It was one of those things they keep in a jar in the tent of a sideshow on the outskirts of a little, drowsy town. One of those pale things drifting in alcohol plasma, forever dreaming and circling, with its peeled, dead eyes staring out at you and n...
Sometimes, it is true, a sense of isolation enfolds me like a cold mist as I sit alone and wait at life’s shut gate. Beyond there is light, and music, and sweet companionship; but I may not enter. Fate, silent, pitiless, bars the way…Silence sits...
I was afraid. Of getting hurt in other ways. To be truthful, I still am." His thumb stroked her cheek. "I would never hurt you." "I don't think you can promise me that." She squeezed his bruised fingers. "But it makes things a bit more equal, to know...
As a child there's a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown-ups lack the strength to ta...
No.” Allie stood her ground. “I’ll not go in.“ “Me, neither.” Jason slid from his horse. “If Allie ain’t going in, I’m not going in.” Wes glanced skyward. How was it possible for his near mute wife to pick up an echo? After four y...
If you don’t know what love feels like, you’re in luck, because I just finished making a new pair of Love Gloves. They’re lined with fur and are perfect for a cold February 14th winter day. I’ll let you borrow them sometime, maybe even this s...
You can't just make yourself matter and then die, Alaska, because now I am irretrievably different, and I'm sorry I let you go, yes, but you made the choice. You left me Perhapsless, stuck in your goddamned labyrinth. And now I don't even know if you...
I mind how I said to you once that there is a price for being good the same as for being bad; a cost to pay. And it's the good men that cant deny the bill when it comes around. They cant deny it for the reason that there aint any way to make them pay...
I have something to say to the religionist who feels atheists never say anything positive: You are an intelligent human being. Your life is valuable for its own sake. You are not second-class in the universe, deriving meaning and purpose from some ot...
After a universal silence, Leo was the first to speak. “Did anyone else notice—” “Yes,” Catherine said. “What do you make of it?” “I haven’t decided yet.” Leo frowned and took a sip of port. “He’s not someone I would pair Bea ...
If we meet and I say, "Hi," That's a salutation. If you ask me how I feel, That's a consideration. If we stop and talk awhile, That's a conversation. If we understand each other, That's communication. If we argue, scream and fight, That's an altercat...
You don’t annoy me.” Carefully he rebuttoned the placket of her shirt. “I thought you did, at first. But now I realize it was more like the feeling you get when your foot’s been asleep. And when you start moving, the blood coming back into it...
We do children an enormous disservice when we assume that they cannot appreciate anything beyond drive through fare and nutritionally marginal, kid-targeted convenience foods. Our children are capable of consuming something that grew in a garden or o...
Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dess? I though that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you an...
