When I penetrate into that house, if I ever do, it will be to go on turning, faster and faster, more and more convulsive, like a constipated dog, or one suffering from worms, overturning furniture, in the midst of my family all trying to embrace me a...
He takes two steps back. Closer to the portal. I can't stop myself. "Ben," I call. And I'm not even embarrassed about how helpless my voice sounds. Don't go. "I'll come back for you." He takes another step back. "I promise." Stay. "Janelle Tenner," h...
Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams....
Wonderful?" wrote J.O. Young in his diary. "To stand cheering, crying, waving your hat and acting like a damn fool in general. No one who has spent all but 16 days of the this war as a Nip prisoner can really know what it means to see 'Old Sammy' buz...
Lacan wrote about two levels of speaking, one in which we know what we are saying (even when struggling with something difficult or contradictory) and another in which we have no idea of what we are saying. In this second level of speaking there are ...
At most schools, the social, intellectual, and spiritual components are confined to separate experiential spheres. We party, we learn, and we contemplate the metaphysical, but we rarely do all three simultaneously and en masse. Maybe most college stu...
There's always a strange feeling you get when you come across one particular line by chance. It feels somehow significant. That's irrational of course, but humans are irrational creatures. Even the sturdiest, most down-to-earth chap will turn pale if...
Whoa, Dimitri," I said, tossing my bag on the floor. "I realize this is actually a current hit in Eastern Europe right now, but do you think we could maybe listen to something that wasn't recorded before I was born?” Only his eyes flicked toward me...
Something in me didnt believe that. I read it again, trying to make sense of the old-fashioned language. Mason watched me curiously, looking like he very much wanted to help. "Maybe they were hooking up," he suggested. I laughed. "He was a " "So? Sai...
His dark blond hair was short and neatly trimmed around his ears. The blond highlighted it just enough to make one think it'd been kissed by the sun, but I knew better. Stopping a few feet away, he watched me. I squirmed under his perusal. "So, are w...
Heart weeps. Head tries to help heart. Head tells heart how it is, again: You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday. Heart feels better, then. But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart....
How do you know it'll be pleasurable?" He got on the bed and lay down. Breath a whisper, she came closer and tied one wrist to the headboard. The cat growled but didn't try to make him wrench free. "Because just looking at you gives me the most extre...
A year ago on my twenty-third birthday, I rebuffed the advances of a beautiful young woman whom I did not love. Alas, she turned out to be a sorceress. She repaid me by casting a spell that forces every female I touch to fall into a frenzy of lust." ...
We appealed to the conscience of the world. The world has no conscience. We have no one but ourselves." The fight. The struggle. The historic destiny. The return of the people. The cause: life therefore having a meaning and shape that eludes the rest...
Sometimes you imagine that everything could have been different for you, that if only you had gone right one day when you chose to go left, you would be living a life you could never have anticipated. But at other times you think there was no other w...
People said that video games were bad because they made you numb to death, made you register entrails splattering across a screen as a sign of success. In that moment, Val thought that the real problem with games was that the player was suppossed to ...
I blew through her like baby’s breath through a dandelion, and my soul left its mark on hers. Forever. In one night, I’d bound her too me for as long as she lived, and I had no words to tell her. When I woke the next night, to see her there, abov...
For that short space of time, she forgot she was sad and a little afraid. She let herself forget that after tonight, she might never see him again and that if she did, whatever it was between them would no longer exist. When he deepened the kiss and ...
We—humanity—didn’t come this far by being afraid. Explorers and visionaries have willingly headed off to certain death for thousands of years and by doing so brought us to where we are today. No one has ever told us ‘no’ and succeeded in ma...
Knowledge can be acquired by a suitable and complete study, no matter what the starting point is. Only one must know how to 'learn.' What is nearest to us is man; and you are the nearest of all men to yourself. Begin with the study of yourself; remem...
History, as it was purveyed to us, was not so much a narrative, not even the detached observation of the rise and fall of fortunes and cultures. It was the litany of loss, attended by the inevitable sympathy for the vanquished side. The past was alwa...
