In suffocating the voice of conscience, passion carries with itself a restlessness of the body and the senses: it is the restlessness of the "external man." When the internal man has been reduced to silence, then passion, once it has been given freed...
She felt vulnerable and alone and had a sense that a great opportunity was slipping through her fingers. Once again, she felt that life was not treating her as it treated other people: it gave her every chance to achieve something, and just when she ...
My music teacher offered twittering madrigals and something about how, in Italy, in Italy, the oranges hang on the tree. He treated me - the humiliation of it - as a soprano. These, by contrast, are the six elements of a Sacred Harp alto: rage, darkn...
Authors are far closer to the truths enfolded in mystery than ordinary people, because of that very audacity of imagination which irritates their plodding critics. As only those who dare to make mistakes succeed greatly, only those who shake free the...
How many rooms are there in the chambers of your heart? How many rooms full of memories can you describe like the one I’m going to tell you about. You know how you left him don’t you? The man you were so in love with once. Bing Cherry Silk. Anoth...
I had eventually come to understand that friendship was a delicate, gradual process that mustn’t be rushed or seized upon but allowed and encouraged to take its course over time. I pictured it as a butterfly, simultaneously beautiful and fragile, t...
Once, when she was trying to explain why she’d returned to Hungary, Marika said, 'Sometimes if you don’t go backwards, you can’t move forwards.' I’d repeated this to my father, hoping he’d be able to unravel her words. But he’d just mutte...
One of his private vanities was that all the garbage sorting had endowed his hands with killing strength—that he could chop a brick in half like Bruce Lee. “So let’s get a brick,” replied a girl with whom he had once, injudiciously, shared th...
The Tote End (a large and foreboding terrace at Eastville) itself was demolished in the nineties. Sadly a monstrous Ikea store now stands in it's place. Where once tribes of youths performed their rites of passage and bodily fluids flowed in the name...
But I never just quite liked that ryhme.' 'Why not, child?' 'Because it seems to say one's as good as another, or two new ones are better than one that's lost. . . . Somehow, when once you've looked into anybody's eyes, right deep down into them, I m...
This was the plan: we would take a holy and sacred picture of the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Elvis Presley, to the very summit of the earth; once there, we would place it with sincere reverence amongst the chimerical shimmering palaces of ice and sno...
Once he gets to the fort the colonel turns to John Wayne and says, "I did see a few Indians on the way over here." And John Wayne, with this really cool look on his face, replies, 'Don't worry. If you were able to spot some Indians, that means there ...
...And yet a knowledge is here that tenses the throat as for song: the inheritance of the ones, alive or once alive, who stand behind the ones I have imagined, who took into their minds the troubles of this place, blights of love and race, but saw a ...
Sophie has a gift," she said. "She has the Sight. She can see what others do not. In her old life she often wondered if she was mad. Now she knows that she is not mad but special. There, she was only a parlor maid, who would likely have lost her posi...
Maybe it's a stretch to blame a broader social pathology on hyper-competitive soccer parents. Still, there is not a huge downside to asking every once in a while, Why am I doing this? We will know for certain that my analysis is wrong when we see the...
Don't see me as a girl. See me as a buddy of yours or something." He cast his eyes downward and didn't look back up to my face. I looked down and groaned. Such a guy. "My buddies don't have boobs, as far as I know." "Because you felt them up to be su...
As the episode of Scandal ended, I sat up in my bed and thought, I have to read it again. It was driving me crazy, so I got out of bed and skipped down stairs of my comfy loft on the east side of Paradise Hills. Once downstairs I slipped the letter o...
The most important thing in defining child sexual abuse is the experience of the child. It takes very little for a child’s world to be devastated. A single experience can have a profound impact on a child’s life. A man sticks his hand in his daug...
He was having more fun than a barrelful of monkeys.* *Several years earlier Spider had actually been tremendously disappointed by a barrelful of monkeys. It had done nothing he had considered particularly entertaining, apart from emit interesting noi...
The engaged mind, illuminated by truth, awakens awareness; the engaged heart, affected by love, awakens passion. May I say once more - this essential energy of the soul is not an ecstatic trance, high emotion or a sanguine stance toward life: It is a...
College had once been my greatest aspiration; it stood for everything my mother did not—intellectualism, feminism, freedom. But being kidnapped had given me plenty of time to think, and somewhere between all that fear and dread, I'd realized that w...
