I am terribly glad to be alive and when I have wit enough to think about it, terribly proud to be a man and an American with all the rights and privileges that those words connote. And most of all I am humbled before the responsibilities that are als...
Our immediate interests are after all of but small moment. It is what we do for the future, what we add to the sum of man's knowledge, that counts most. As someone has said, 'The individual withers and the world is more and more.' Man dies at 70, 80,...
Every little girl wants a prince, a prince who only has eyes for her...but who are we kidding...there's no such thing as fairytales. Don't get me wrong...the world is full of dragons and damsels...just not every one of them goes on to live "happily-e...
During the act of making something, I experience a kind of blissful absence of the self and a loss of time. When I am done, I return to both feeling as restored as if I had been on a trip. I almost never get this feeling any other way. I once spent s...
Dantes had entered the Chateau d’If with the round, open, smiling face of a young and happy man, with whom the early paths of life have been smooth. and who anticipates a future corresponding with his past. This was now all changed. The oval face w...
Look, look,' cried the count, seizing the young man's hands - "look, for on my soul it is curious. Here is a man who had resigned himself to his fate, who was going to the scaffold to die - like a coward, it is true, but he was about to die without r...
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go. We think by feeling. What is there to know? I hear my being dance from ear to ear. I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. Of those...
I Am Vertical But I would rather be horizontal. I am not a tree with my root in the soil Sucking up minerals and motherly love So that each March I may gleam into leaf, Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly ...
As Ian popped the lock and opened the car door, he turned to Phoebe. “Can you do me a favour?” She immediately stepped toward him, fully embracing their new mature relationship. “Of course.” Ian looked pointedly over his own shoulder and said...
You’re a prickly, stubborn, spirited woman.” “Don’t forget crude, rude, and vulgar.” “Only when it suits you. You’re sly when occasion calls for it, direct to the point of forgetting tact even exists, sarcastic, fierce, I did mention st...
Once I started trying to give positive reviews, though, I began to understand how much happiness I took from the joyous ones in my life---and how much effort it must take for them to be consistently good=tempered and positive. It is easy to be heavy;...
One reason might be that if I hadn't tripped, I'd have been hamburger. When this sort of thing occurs, people often say that there was some power greater than themselves at work. This sounds reasonable. I am just suggesting that it is not necessary t...
A man once asked me ... how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was ...
Not only do I not know what I believe, but also I cannot know for sure that I believe. How can I define precisely what my attitude is toward something it cannot conceivably grasp? Can I be said to be in the relation of "belief," in any usual sense of...
Miles just smiled and felt her love flow around his own. Yet inside his love was a rock, and it had the words “payback is sweet” written in large letters on it. He laughed and she looked up at him and saw the hard glint in his eyes. “Uh oh!” ...
Earth processes that seem trivially slow in human time can accomplish stunning work in geologic time. Let the Colorado River erode its bed by 1/100th of an inch each year (about the thickness of one of your fingernails.) Multiply it by six million ye...
While Elstir, at my request, went on painting, I wandered about in the half-light, stopping to examine first one picture, then another. Most of those that covered the walls were not what I should chiefly have liked to see of his work, paintings in wh...
I need to give you one last bit of advice in the off chance this rather extraordinary and enviable situation in which you find yourself is actually true- that somehow you've fallen deep down into a Cordova story. I stared back at him. Be the good guy...
We dance. Sweet, downcast, through-the-lashes-glances bely every beating she got at thirteen, every lash of the tongue from her dad at fourteen, every heroin high that let her out for awhile, every hour and day she had to be tough. She is so natural ...
The sky [above Tehran] was like a star-eaten black blanket, and so far as I could read them its constellations were unfamiliar. Lawrence speaks somewhere of drawing 'strength from the depths of the universe'; Malcolm Lowry speaks about the deadness o...
There is a great difference between one idler and another idler. There is someone who is an idler out of laziness and lack of character, owing to the baseness of his nature. If you like, you may take me for one of those. Then there is the other kind ...
