War becomes a part of you. It is a feeling just as much as an experience. If you can’t feel it, you weren’t paying attention. And if you weren’t paying attention, you are probably dead anyway.
I wanted to see my family, but didn't want to leave the other guys. The people waiting for us were strangers, even though I knew every last one of them.
I wasn't writing home. I wasn't writing a death letter, either. I was writing a death journal, a piece of fiction meant for my family and my fiancee, Sara.
On Sundays Mom invariably ran out of money, which is when she cracked eggs into the skillet over cubes of fried black sourdough bread. It was, I think, the most delicious and eloquent expression of pauperism.
Look before you leap. Don't take risks lightly. Make sure someone is watching your back. Safety is a shifting illusion, move with it," Grandpa recited in Hadadian before leaning forward and adding his own little ending, "And pray. Trust that God know...
Her constant phrase, "Go with God", had puzzled me a good deal. Suddenly it became clear. It was a revelation - acceptance. It filled me with joy. Accept life, the world, Spirit, God, call it what you will, and all else will follow.
Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are ke...
...Having felt the piercing gash of grief and lived through it, having loved to the brink of brokenness, and having learned the difference between friendship and frivolity, one eventually takes a conscious step through the invisible membrane that sep...
I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures. ...We tell the story to get them back, to capture the traces of footfalls through the snow.
I was so happy that my mother, father, and two brothers had somehow found one another. Perhaps my mother and father have gotten back together, I thought.
If this all sounds melodramatic, well that, too, isn’t a bad metaphor for anxiety—as a kind of drama queen of the mind. If you have ever been friends with a drama queen you know how taxing it can be. To have one in your head is enough to make you...
Take any two-year-old through a car wash and their skulls are blown. FLAPS! FOAM! ROLLING THINGS! It's the closest they'll ever get to being inside a working spaceship.
There is always a curve n the road when it comes to a relationship,don't let others bring you down to their level because of their own unhappiness and insecurities that they have within themselves.
Once a restless or frayed mood has turned to anger, or violence, or psychosis, Richard, like most, finds it very difficult to see it as illness, rather than being willful, angry, irrational or simply tiresome.
I have a remarkable ability to delete all better judgement from my brain when I get my head set on something. I have no sense of moderation, no sense of caution. I have no sense pretty much.
When Stephen King elaborated on his inspirations for his novel "Carrie" he draws from a time when he was a young man, and describes his impression when he came upon a statue of Christ on the cross, hanging there in misery, and he thought
I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.
If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are...
Test everything that can be tested. As soon as you think you know something, that's when you stop questioning it. Understanding kills curiosity. Understanding kills progress.
I'd written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one's own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I'd made a habit--and eventually a profession--of memoir because I hail fro...
Of course, I’ve told Jesus to suck it, too, which earned me a certain measure of notoriety, because you have to make fun of any religion that would let you have sixteen kids and say it’s God’s will.
