So I found myself telling my own stories. It was strange: as I did it I realised how much we get shaped by our stories. It's like the stories of our lives make us the people we are. If someone had no stories, they wouldn't be human, wouldn't exist. A...
No, Susanna, " he said. "I cannot love you just a little. If that's what you want, you must find a different man." His green eyes were breathtaking in their intensity. His thumb brushed her bottom lip. "Because I can only love you entirely. With ever...
Oh Harry," [Gwen] said. "I wish I were a different kind of person." What kind of person, he wanted to know. "Someone," she said slowly, "who truly loves life." He was still looking at her, still cradling his glasses in his left hand. He said, "You're...
We look so very different from the way we sound. It’s a shock, similar to hearing your own voice for the first time, when you’re forced to wonder how the rest of you comes across if you sound nothing like the way you think you sound. You feel dis...
I want you to spend the night,” you said. And it was definitely your phrasing that ensured it. If you had said, “Let’s have sex,” or “Let’s go to my place,” or even “I really want you,” I’m not sure we would have gone quite as far...
I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . . that one of the most deeply human, an...
Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction — you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of ...
A Good Man. Every night, like a question-and-answer prayer, my son and I recite...What are you going to be? And he says...An honest man. A fair man. A courageous man. And a good man. That's the most important thing, Papa. And my job is finally done. ...
I was staying in a hotel in San Francisco for a couple of nights, before flying back to the UK. My hotel was a desperate grey block made from paper and people’s screams. At night the sound of strangers having icy sex echoed off the building and pou...
I feel like I'm in a film about a struggling artist who keeps getting up at all hours of the night to look at his big, blank empty canvas. And in a way I am. Except that i'm not struggling. I'm Hector Kipling. I might be getting up at all hours of th...
Adam says I isolate. He is addicted to telling me that I spend too much time in my head. It’s an unhealthy behavior. Look, I don’t see how not bothering other people with your screwed-up vision of the world constitutes unhealthy behavior.
Rafael?” ”Yeah?” „Do we all have monsters?” „Yes.” „Why does God give us so many monsters?” „You want to know my theory?” „Sure.” „I think it’s other people who give us monsters. Maybe God doesn’t have anything to do w...
I have this idea stuck in my head that you have to be born beautiful in order to dream beautiful things. God didn't write beautiful on my heart. I'm stuck with all my bad dreams. Bad dreams for bad boys. I guess that's the way it is for me. Look, the...
I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been - if you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you - you will know that there comes in the end a sort o...
Whatever one of us asked the other to do - it was assumed the asker would weigh all the consequences - the other would do. Thus one might wake the other in the night and ask for a cup of water; and the other would peacefully (and sleepily) fetch it. ...
In the last three months, I’ve started having creepy dreams that give me a glimpse of the future. Or sometimes a portal will open up in the middle of the night and something will try to kill me. There’s no way to know which one I’m gonna get hi...
Not a single star will be left in the night. The night will not be left. I will die and, with me, the weight of the intolerable universe. I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions, the continents and faces. I shall erase the accumulated past. I shal...
Do you remember anything about last night?" he asked. Her stomach churned as memories of the night before swam into mental view. Oh, she recalled a few things. How could she forget? She took a solid gulp of her coffee. "I remember vodka, an ax murder...
Christmas Eve was a night of song that wrapped itself about you like a shawl. But it warmed more than your body. It warmed your heart... filled it, too, with a melody that would last forever. Even though you grew up and found you could never quite br...
No matter how much he talked, she never answered him, but he knew she was still there. He knew it was like the soldiers he had read about. They would have an arm or a leg blown off, and for days, even weeks after it happened, they could still feel th...
If she’d thought cutting ties with Galen would help her get on with her life, Harper knew that after today, she’d never, ever get him out of her system. He was a drug she couldn’t kick, an addiction she was willing to die for. And as he drew he...