I never felt totally, 100%, patriotically English... I'd seen a lot of the world by an early age - sort of spent a lot of time traveling around Lebanon and I'd seen Babylon, and Damascus, and all sorts of places in the Middle East by the time I was t...
Past middle age, some friends suggested that I should have my eyebags removed, the deepening creases on my face stretched. I often examined my face in the mirror, imagining how I'd look if I followed the suggestion. I decided to retain the old mug. I...
I am in the middle of it: chaos and poetry; poetry and love and again, complete chaos. Pain, disorder, occasional clarity; and at the bottom of it all: only love; poetry. Sheer enchantment, fear, humiliation. It all comes with love
My mother was tickled and I think kind of proud when my father got hit on my an attractive middle-aged Asian lady who hadn't noticed he was with his family. He was certainly pleased about it.
And middle-class women, although taught to value established forms, are in the same position as the working class: neither can use established forms to express what the forms were never intended to express (and may very well operate to conceal).
To the modernist, “myth,” like religion, merely signifies a comfortable and entrenched lie. For the postmodernist, myth simply represents one story, one narrative among many; it is purely subjective, certainly signifying nothing of transcendent o...
Sitting here, beneath this majestic oak tree under the hot afternoon sun in the middle of nowhere, the concept of time, present, and future, were all blurred. What was time if you didn’t know whether you had it? When you weren’t sure what you had...
I was surrounded by ripples and cascades of Light, rising and falling all around me, like immense waves in the middle of a huge ocean. I was a tiny girl-child, newborn.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I'd be up for hearing about the one-eyed chick," Vida said with a shrug. "You are atually the worst person I have ever met," Chubs said. "And people like you are the reason we have middle fingers.
Well, He had known what love was-a sharp pang, a fierce experience, in the midst of whose flames he was struggling! but, through that furnace he would fight his way out into the serenity of middle age,-all the richer and more human for having known t...
Don't blame us," said my mother. "We didn't blow up half of Court, steal a dozen cars, call out a murderer in the middle of a crowd, or get our teenage friend crowned queen." "Actually," said Abe, "I blow up half of Court.
He looked up at the reddening sky and said with a self-deprecating laugh, "You put me to shame, Seraphina. Your bravery always has." "It's not bravery; it's bullheaded bumbling." He shook his head, staring off into the middle distance. "I know courag...
Animals had returned to what was left of the forest...clusters of orange butterflies exploded off the blackish purple piles of bear sign and winked and fluttered magically like leaves without trees. More bears than people traveled the muddy road, lea...
He had a toughness about him, and his five grand Savile Row suit did little to hide the fact that he worked out regularly. He looked like someone who could've gone either way, the mob or something legitimate, and somehow ended up in the middle as a l...
Do you know the feeling you get when you are awakened in the middle of a dream? The dream story is still real and full of color, but the waking world is rushing back into your mind. And for a moment both worlds are true, and you cannot quite tell the...
A brick could be strapped to the back of a pet gerbil, to teach it how to swim. That’s how I learned to swim. Grandpa glued a gerbil to my back, dropped me off in the middle of Lake Erie, and told me he expected both of us back for dinner the follo...
The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like ...
Raven, holding Joshua's chin, asks him how old he is. Joshua, folding in the pinky and the thumb on his left hand, while leaning on Raven's legs, raises three middle fingers into the air. "That's what I thought. You're three.
I knew from Brianna that being beautiful wasn’t all great. Brianna had changed in middle school. One day we were both seventh graders and the next, she was a supermodel who had a seventh grader for a best friend.
And every year there is a brief, startling moment When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air: It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodi...
Squandering time is a luxury of profligate youth, when the years are to us as dollars are to billionaires. Doing the same thing in middle age just makes you nervous, not with vague puritan guilt but the more urgent worry that you're running out of ti...
