As he drove away, I began to think that what kept us together was perhaps not even our romance with an imaginary France. That was just a veneer, an illusion. Rather, it was our desperate inability to lead ordinary lives with ordinary people anywhere-...
There is so little to remember of anyone - an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and tha...
She sits down and puts her hand to her chest and rocks. Thinks of all she has lost and will lose. All she has had and will have. It seems to her that life is like gathering berries into an apron with a hole. Why do we keep on? Because the berries are...
Fucking Hallmark never wrote anything for how I felt then. When Metallica and the rest of the metal community pitched in to pay for Acrassicauda, the Iraqi heavy metal band, to move to the US is the only thing that comes close. And maybe the late-bre...
New beginnings always had something special—starting at the bottom and making it to the top produced something magical. When you reach your destination, your goal, that’s when it really hits home. Maybe that’s why I felt the way I did. I knew I...
In fact, since the accident, Mom doesn't love anyone. She is marble. Beautiful. Frigid. Easily stained by her family. What's left of us anyway. We are corpses. At first, we sought rebirth. But resurrection devoid of her love has made us zombies. We g...
In the next days it took little provocation for us to flick the flint of our Zippo lighters. Thatched roofs take the flame quickly, and on bad days the hamlets of Pinkville burned, taking our revenge in fire. It was good to walk from Pinkville and to...
Vaughn folded his arms. ‘The reason why you’ve lasted longer than most of your erstwhile colleagues is because you don’t do drama. I don’t like drama. I get enough drama at home. My wife could teach the RSC a few things about drama.' For some...
I’ve been washing stairs my whole life. One day after the other. Since I was five years old. I’ve never complained. Shame on you. I’m embarrassed to have a son like you…can’t even look after his own bicycle. You just wait until your dad com...
Do not be afriad! I can see that Americans are not afraid. They are not afraid of the sun, they are not afraid of the wind, they are not afraid of 'today'. They are, generally speaking, brave, good people. And so I say to you today, always be brave. ...
During his hajj, Malcolm [Malcolm X] fell into a new Islam with the same blind faith that he had given to Elijah. Since he lived just a year after his hajj, Mecca became the neatly presented and cinema-friendly conclusion to his lifelong thread of tr...
My brothers, we have a special and distinct role as Christian men, fathers, husbands, and leaders in the family, in the Church, and in society at large. If we don’t step up, we run the risk of seeing our families overrun and absorbed by the surroun...
There are no such enemies So dire as good people, They will rob you, mournfully, And condemn you, weeping, They'll invite you to their home, Welcome you profusely, Ask you all about yourself, To mock and abuse you, Later, mock at you and jeer, To gra...
A man of God would never burn or harm a temple of any kind -- regardless of religion. A true man of God would see every temple or divine mansion built to glorify the Creator -- as an extension of the temple closest to his home, regardless of its shap...
Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most un...
I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn't know how to connect with the people there. I was afraid, for all of my life, right up until I knew it was ending. That was when I realized, as terrifying and painful as real...
Perhaps if Man is finally to know the bodiless, timeless, transcendent Ground of the whole universe not as a mere philosophical abstraction but as the Lord who, despite this transcendence, is "not far from any one of us", as an utterly concrete Being...
The danger of restorative nostalgia lies in its belief that the mutilated 'wholeness' of the body politic can be repaired. But the reflective nostalgic understands deep down that loss is irrecoverable: Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to s...
I'd sit around dreaming that the boys I saw at shows or at work - the boys with silver earrings and big boots - would tell me I was beautiful, take me home and feed me Thai food or omelets and undress me and make love to me all night with the palm tr...
If he's a poet, why's he in jail?" demanded a suspicious voice. Madam Chairwoman shrugged velvet shoulders. "Perhaps he writes free verse," she suggested cunningly. A stir of approval answered her. Mice are all for people being free, so that they too...
She reached up to place her fingertips to his lips as she stared up at him with a warm, tender expression. "I wish you had come home to me so that I could have helped you." He pulled the cloth away from her face and stared at her for a hard second. "...
