Our lives are made up of choices. Big ones, small ones, strung together by the thin air of good intentions; a line of dominoes, ready to fall. Which shirt to wear on a cold winter's morning, what crappy junk food to eat for lunch. It starts out so in...
W turned on his heel and began walking toward the door at the far wall. And by walking I mean, of course, not moving at all, at least not to the naked eye, because his strides could only be measured in micrometers. His creaky legs made barely the tin...
I smiled and rolled onto my side, bringing my arms around her. She wiggled against me, letting me spoon her, and I swept some sweaty hair away from her neck to kiss beneath her ear. “How do you like your new tattoo?” “I love it. It makes me wan...
She wished she wasn’t jealous, but in quiet, weak moments, she desperately wanted to be like them. She wanted gentlemen to shoulder each other out of the way for her attention, to hang on her every word, however vapid those words would have to be. ...
Have you noticed how difficult it is just to get along in the world? If you're no good at all in your job, people treat you badly and eventually you will be unemployed. And if you're a little better than competent, everyone expects miracles from you,...
O smile, going where? O upturned look: new, warm, receding surge of the heart--; alas, we are that surge. Does then the cosmic space we dissolve in taste of us? Do the angels reclaim only what is theirs, their own outstreamed existence, or sometimes,...
Notice that your judgments of what exists are the same kind of judgments you make about how to live your life. There aren't two kinds of things we do: judge what exists and decide what we want to do about it. Fundamentally, there is one kind of thing...
A great library doesn't have to be big or beautiful. It doesn't have to have the best facilities or the most efficient staff or the most users. A great library provides. It is enmeshed in the life of a community in a way that makes it indispensable. ...
I only had two real tasks [while in Norway]: gathering dead trees to burn from the surrounding small forest and getting water from a hole in a frozen stream. The rest of the time I wandered around, obsessed over my life dramas, stared into space, rea...
If on the other hand we found even one reader to whom the cheap little book with its double columns and the lurid daub on its cover had been a lifelong delight, who had read and reread it, who would notice, and object, if a single word were changed, ...
Nearly all our older poetry was written and read by men to whom the distinction between poetry and rhetoric, in its modern form, would have been meaningless. The 'beauties' which they chiefly regarded in every composition were those which we either d...
What is vital and healthy does not necessarily survive... An art, a whole civilization, may at any time slip through men's fingers in a very few years and be gone beyond recovery. If we are alive when such a thing is happening we shall hardly notice ...
My 30th birthday will be arriving in a few months. It’s not arriving unexpectedly, I just wish it would have given me more of an advance notice, say another 30 years.
It’s hard to steal somebody’s shoes while they are wearing them and not have them notice. But that’s what politicians have done in this country. Not only that, but they replaced all our footwear with concrete boots.
I think what hurts the most is that I just really want to belong. I want to stand inside the circle of other people and be noticed for the right things, but it seems like the wrong things are always bigger. And all the advie I've ever read --smile mo...
He was the kind of man you didn’t notice at first…but then found yourself staring. There was something…something she’d never been able to put her finger on…that inspired a double, triple, quadruple look. He was forever lurking in corners wi...
Words got in the way. The things we felt the hardest--like what it was like to have a boy touch you as if you were made of light, or what it meant to be the only person in the room who wasn't noticed--weren't sentences; they were knots in the wood of...
But the plans were on display…” “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.” “That’s the display department.” “With a flashlight.” “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.” “So had the stairs.” “Bu...
Experiencing what we did with Lucifer taught me so much. Things I will take with me forever, even when my human life is over. I’ve seen the dark side of life now. How one single event can change the course of forever and turn you into something you...
It doesn't matter whether a sequence of words is called a history or a story: that is, whether it is intended to follow a sequence of actual events or not. As far as its verbal shape is concerned, it will be equally mythical in either case. But we no...
Socrates: Have you noticed on our journey how often the citizens of this new land remind each other it is a free country? Plato: I have, and think it odd they do this. Socrates: How so, Plato? Plato: It is like reminding a baker he is a baker, or a s...
