The story Grandpa told us helped me realize that people cannot be divided into groups by ethnicity, religion, or any other feature, only into groups of good, bad, and indifferent people.
Still, I never heard him say that he hated or wanted to hurt or kill someone for all the horrific things that had been happening to him and his family.
With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in the public square, the poor in spirit have no one but Jesus to call them blessed anymore.
To have deep roots in a place means having dead buried there. It is almost that literal, the dead forming your bond to the earth and to the others whose dead lie buried there. I always had that bond whether I knew it or not.
Was there any meaning to life or to war, that two men should sit together and jump within seconds of each other and yet never meet on the ground below?
She was my friend and I loved her and relied on her, even though there were days when her moodiness and fragility frightened me, because they reminded me of my own tenuous grasp on life.
When it started to climb between my legs, my balls and its claws only separated by a thin blanket, I sincerely considered throwing it (the cat, not my member) out of the window.
Caught in a terrible cycle, I was thinking about what I thought about my own thoughts, so I went to the bar where I got myself a glass of water.
It took me far too long to realize that lost years and relationships cannot be recovered. That damage done to oneself and others cannot always be put right again.
Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were.
Mother, who has an absolute belief that it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them, is, by far, the highest card I was dealt.
Words borrowed of antiquity do lend a kind of majesty to style, and are not without their delight sometimes.
Never, never underestimate the power of desire. If you want to live badly enough, you can live. The great question, at least for me, was: How do I decide I want to live?
Bear in mind you have a life to live. There is an incredible loss. There is a profound grief. And there is, in the end, after a long time and more work than you ever thought possible, a time when it gets easier.
It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.
In retrospect, this seems to summarize all the insanity of that time. Guy is standing on top of a burning building. Helicopter arrives, hovers, drops a rope ladder. the man leaning out of the helicopter's door shouts. Guy on top of burning building r...
I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.
If you're just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television's electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.
In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.
It seems to occur to few of the attendees [of a writing retreat] that if you have a feel you just can't describe, you might just be, I don't know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class.
If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3,900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print.
