Our parents thought we might be corrupted by one another into becoming whatever it was they most feared: an incorrigible masturbator, a winsome homosexual, a recklessly impregnatory libertine. On our behalf they dreaded the closeness of adolescent fr...
Christine did not live, or love, as most people do. She lived boundlessly, as generous as she could be cruel, prepared to give her life at any moment for a worthy cause, but rarely sparing a thought for the many casualties that fell in her wake.
At the door he turned and looked back. She stood, facing away from him, the sunlight from the window enshrouding her in an unmerited halo of gold. Perhaps, he thought, that was how God saw all His children. Selfish and fallen, yes. But in the forgivi...
How long had it had been since she'd thought back on the evenings around the fire, number games at the kitchen table, or listening to her father sing? Too long. Yes, there had been bad times. And she had tallied them like figures in a column, not rem...
He thought about his long life and gave thanks for all the bounty and joy that he had been given. To want more, to wish for yet more, he knew, would be petty. He sighed happily, and listened to the wind sweeping down from the mountains, to the chirpi...
Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn't being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love--it's being unhappy...
Her future, she thought, was likely to be worse than her past, for after her years of contented renunciation, she had slipped back into desire and longing; she found joyless days of distasteful occupation harder and harder; she found the image of the...
If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn't make it so. Words and thoughts don’t change anything. Language and reality are kept strictly apart — reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn't care what you t...
How resilient was the body, to return to its prior form so quickly! Yet the mind was formed of a less pliable substance. The emptiness in her thoughts would not be so easily filled. Instead there was a hollowness among them-a place she had reserved f...
It takes time,patience and endurance to become a devout Muslim. No one, not even God, expects anyone to become an angel overnight. That’s fortunate, I thought, because I sensed that the road ahead might be a long one
Its culture: the fruit of its life, the product of its own efforts in thought and art. This culture is not international. It is the expression of the national genius, of the blood. The culture is international in its brilliance but national in origin...
How wonderful are the women and men in the world who feed us. Especially those who feed us with no salary. The mothers—I thought. The wives.
That's what got her, of course. That everyone thought it so unbelievable that she could possibly attract a man like him. It shouldn't upset her because it was true. She couldn't. Not in this world, in this lifetime. Yet she didn't appreciated everyon...
I'll tell you something, Harpy," he said, his voice almost a whisper now. "It never even occurred to me that we wouldn't make it. And it never occurred to you that we would. You were just waiting for us to go down in flames. I thought we could get th...
Stick Boy liked Match Girl, He liked her a lot. He liked her cute figure, he thought she was hot. But could a flame ever burn for a match and a stick? It did quite literally; he burned up quick.
Am I your dom, little rabbit?” “Yes.” Her red-brown brows drew together. “What’s wrong?” “Not a thing.” He gave her a faint smile, and his gravelly voice deepened. “I thought I’d tell you we’re getting married next month.” ~No...
People who live with OCD drag a metal sea anchor around. Obsession is a break, a source of drag, not a badge of creativity, a mark of genius or an inconvenient side effect of some greater function.
Mile's fingers pressed into the small of my back. "Basorexia," he mumbled. "Gesundheit." He laughed. "It's an overwhelming desire to kiss." "I thought you weren't good at figuring out what you felt." "I'm probably using the word in the wrong context....
Small children will talk to anyone, once the guard of shyness has fallen, and they have, like the elderly, a sense of immediacy, a need to say or do something, now, now, the minute it is thought of, combined with that other sense, of the complete irr...
But the inexplicability of the General's conduct dwelt much on her thoughts. That he was very particular in his eating, she had, by her own unassisted observation, already discovered; but why should he say one thing so positively, and mean another al...
The promise of aspiration is that it is evolutionary. The human condition is such that we are always aspiring to be something more, something better, something nobler. It starts as a thought, a want, a need, or a desire and then grows and evolves wit...
