How about I take you to my studio? Much less dangerous. Plus, I need a model and you could sit for me." "You want me to sit for a portrait?" I asked stunned. "Actually, at the moment I'm concentrating on full-length nudes, in the spirit of Modigliani...
I knew that I was in better shape than she was because I was the one who pushed for the split. Still, even a year later I was still very vulnerable to her actions. If I saw her at the supermarket, or someone brought her name up, or if she called abou...
My muscles informed me they did not want to go through any more exercise today. So I suggest that maybe he should let me off this time. He laughed, and I'm pretty sure it was at me...not with me. "Why is that funny?" "Oh," he said, his smile dropping...
and afterward, after it was done, it was too much, and I felt like I was going to... I don't know.... explode, and it was just too much, I had to let it out you know? I had to- I interrupted her hysteria It's okay, I understand. That was a lie. I did...
Fear, sadness. They’re not weaknesses. They are overpowering, defining emotions. They make you human, Sophie.” “They are signs of defect,” I told him, reverting back to curt Sophie. “Says who?” “Me.” “Why?” “Because I — becaus...
Denial returned, like a nagging cough you can never quite shake. Actually, it was always close at hand, and even though "satanic ritual abuse" did describe what had happened to me when I was a child. the concept was so foreign and so horrific that so...
. . . None of us are born as passive generic blobs waiting for the world to stamp its imprint on us. Instead we show up possessing already a highly refined and individuated soul. Another way of thinking of it is: We're not born with unlimited choices...
I love those dark moments in Peanuts. I love that they're in there, that Charles Schulz put the sad lonely bits of himself into the comic. I love the silliness too, the dancing Snoopy strips. The little boy Rerun drawing "basement" comics about Tarza...
I realize it's commonplace for parents to say to their child sternly, 'I love you, but I don't always like you.' But what kind of love is that? It seems to me that comes down to, 'I'm not oblivious to you - that is, you can still hurt my feelings - b...
He took the pen and book from her and faltered. “Just write anything – anything trivial that won't matter if it comes to pass.” “Erm...” God, he was useless at this. Elena's hair turned blue. “Hey!” “What?” “I don't want blue hair...
Barbara was not much for prayer. She prayed at church and repeated The Lord’s Prayer every morning before she began her day, but apart from that, she did not rely much on prayer. Barbara had a theory that God was going to do whatever He wanted to a...
Here I was just thinking all these wonderful things about you and now you’re trying to strip down before we can have sex.” His hands casually held in the air, he explained, “I was hot.” “It’s seventy degrees in here.” His hands went to ...
I don't want these. They're mud and they've got no color. Or at least the color is different from what I'm used to. Take any American city, in autumn, or in winter, when the light makes the colors dance and flow, and look at it from a distant hill or...
We are split people. For myself, half of me wishes to sit quietly with legs crossed, letting the things that are beyond my control wash over me. But the other half wants to fight a holy war. Jihad! And certainly we could argue this out in the street,...
Anybody with leisure can do that who is willing to begin where everything ought to be begun--that is, at the beginning. Nothing worth calling good can or ever will be started full grown. The essential of any good is life, and the very body of created...
Lately I can't help wanting us to be like other people. For example, if I were a smoker, you'd lift a match to the cigarette just as I put it between my lips. It's never been like that between us: none of that easy chemistry, no quick, half automatic...
If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make... So-- as I recall, the official philosophical answer is that free will doesn't exist. Only the illusion of free will, because the causes of hour behavior are so complex that we...
I remembered Ignifex's smirk and his confident words: I can wait all I want and still have you. And I thought, Here is one thing he isn't getting. Standing on my toes, I kissed Shade on the lips. It was just a bump of my face against his. Despite Aun...
As the chapters took shape, a change came over her. It was the double-sided recognition that this book, the last that she would write, might achieve esteem and success equal to her great novel, but that its emotional heart would lie in her own unhapp...
So many years of being lonely and discounted, no one ever truly seeing me, the person that I really am. The Gabriella I so desperately wanted to be. Yet somehow he broke through the walls and barriers and penetrated my frail, dejected heart. He loves...
If you want to teach your children that they are the tools of God, you had better not teach them that they are God's rifles, or we will have to stand firmly opposed to you: your doctrine has no glory, no special rights, no intrinsic and inalienable m...
