I'd always known that when you went through one of these doors, you went to another planet, and that that other planet might be so far away, you couldn't fly there in spaceship in a million years. Somehow, the whole thing had never seemed strange bef...
Tell me this--if you knew you would be poor as a church mouse all your life--if you knew you'd never have a line published--would you still go on writing-- you?' 'Of course I would,' said Emily disdainfully. 'Why, I to write--I can't help it at times...
I used to go to church. I even went through a rather intense religious period when I was sixteen. But the idea of an everlasting life -- a never-ending banquet, as a stupid visiting minister to our church once appallingly described it -- filled me wi...
Has there ever been a night where you didn’t feel safe? Maybe you felt you were being watched? Or you couldn’t close your eyes for fear of the unknown? If, for only a moment, you let your guard down and hear a sound—unidentified and quiet—may...
What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature… That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in.
Properly understood, the doctrine of sin means that believers are never as good as our true worldview should make us. Similarly, the doctrine of grace means as messed up their false worldview should make them.
Ask for no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping it's life away. To hell with that," he said, "shake th...
Visions and voices and fear and despair cannot be captured by CT scan or measured in the amplitude of EKG waves. Try as we might, we simply cannot predict which of our patients will kill themselves, which will murder their children, and which will le...
It is generally understood that a modern-day book may honorably be based upon an older one, especially since, as Dr. Johnson observed, no man likes owing anything to his contemporaries. The repeated but irrelevant points of congruence between Joyce's...
Properly speaking, altruism is an absurdity. Women are self-sacrificing in direct proportion to their incapacity to offer anything but this sacrifice. They sacrifice what they never had: a self. The cry of the deserted woman, 'What have I done to des...
Elend, my dearest Elend who brings a pile of books to each ball he attends and ignores everybody in favour of having a nice read. Elend who has to grow up rather suddenly in the face of the revolution he has read extensively about, but never thought ...
Now that you’re here, now that they know you exist, you’ll never be free again. Ever. We’re prisoners to our books, our fates planned long before we were born. You’re no different than us. Fight your fate all you want, but deep down you know ...
[...] just remember, the storm doesn't last forever. It can scare you; it can shake you to your core. But it never lasts. The rain subsides, the thunder dies, and the winds calm to a soft whisper. And that moment after the storm clouds pass, when all...
Driving a hot car is a lot like sex to me, or a lot like I keep thinking sex should be: A total body experience, overwhelming, to all the senses, taking you places you've never been, packing a punch that leaves you breathless and touches your soul. T...
I've never wanted more, until I met you." I gasp, reeling. Oh my. Isn't this what I want? He wants more. He wants it, too! My inner goddess has back-flipped off the podium and is doing a cartwheels around the stadium. It's not just me.
The shadow-past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by a smell, a word, a place, th...
The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that nanoseconds had value. The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the m...
Perhaps,” murmured his lordship, “I yielded to a compassionate impulse.” “A what?” gasped his best friend. “Oh, did you think I never did so?” said his lordship, the satirical glint in his eyes extremely pronounced. “You wrong me! I d...
When you feel like you're not making the best of decisions, don't beat yourself up and say that “I never make the right choices.” Choose to say, “I have the wisdom of God and I can make better choices.
In this country, you look at a person, and you know them. It is the inside-out way the people of this country wear their soul. In their eyes you can find civilisations of honesty or sweeping fields of lies. It's taken some getting used to but now Asa...
I made you many and many a song, Yet never one told all you are-- It was as though a net of words Were flung to catch a star; It was as though I curved my hand And dipped sea-water eagerly, Only to find it lost the blue Dark splendor of the sea.
