I saw on his face a glimpse of his past. The damage, the unhappiness and the pain, and I wondered what kind of skeletons he has been hiding and for how long. It’s one of those mutual attraction moments that are unexplainable, but as real as anythin...
He cannot deny a certain relief in being able to sift through academic tomes, fulfilling his journalistic duty without having to barge past security guards at the Arab League or grab man-on-the-street from women at the market. This library work is ea...
Exactly. That's what's been happening here for the past ten thousand years: You've been doing what you damn well please with the world. And of course you mean to go right on doing what you damn well please with it, because the whole damn thing belong...
I have never taken sides, never leaped wholeheartedly into one scale or the other; nor do I realize disappointments, provided they are severe, until the occasion is long past. Yet I am ruled by my emotions, though I murder them at birth.
O for those days when these tired metaphors were teenagers too, when it was still possible to recite ‘Daffodils’ and feel thrilled as you gazed at the golden laburnum in bloom. Recognising clichés is a sign of aging. Sweet as the past may be, it...
Once I embraced the dreams that once inspired. Now I've found that there is too much I didn't recognize as a gift. I may be too late to see, cherish, and endure. I may never change, but be forever stuck in the past without realizing until my eyes ope...
You know, I can see more than just the future or the past." "Really?" I asked, paging through through the papers in the file. "Can you also see the present? Because I can do that, too. Like, right now, I sense that I'm in a messy room with a total to...
A cupcake temple?' Her chest still tight with anxiety, Bertie forced herself to imagine it: bricks of pound cake mortared with buttercream and chocolate ganache, torches like striped birthday candles set into the walls, pilgrims upon the Path of Dele...
She'd cried over a broken heart before. She knew what that felt like, and it didn't feel like this. Her heart felt not so much broken as just ... empty. It felt like she was an outline empty in the middle. The outline cried senselessly for the absent...
The future is meant for those who are willing to let go of the worst parts of the past. When you cannot take two steps without turning around to inspect your footsteps, you are getting nowhere fast.
That was the dirty secret associated with her past. Not that she'd been abused but that somehow she felt that she deserved it because she'd let it happen. Even now, it shamed her, and there were times when she felt hideously ugly, as though the scars...
He knows nothing about how this will all end, except that it will surely end. He tries to imagine himself into a future, somewhere past this point, but he cannot. There is nothing to do but to keep on existing, in this exact time and place. This is w...
The enchantments of the past must always become the disenchantments of the future. But memory, a preservative, may intervene. The embalmer of original enchantments, it is the only human faculty that can outwit the advance of chronological time. Art, ...
In the past, he had never questioned the fact that he was a prince; like the fact that he was the child of his mother and father, it seemed like something that would never change. Yet look how easily he had lost that rank and privilege! A person's fo...
To his surprise, Jean kissed him. So often in the past, teasing, she had said she would, one day. Now she did, and it was a quick and fragrant touch to his lips that gave him courage and, even before he started out made him yearn to come back home.
The scent of growth, quiet and green, hung heavy in the air. I heard everything. I saw everything. I could count the craters on the moon. I could count every mosquito buzz past, bypassing my tender skin out of respect for a fellow bloodsucker.
In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss. To hold a gesture, a smell, a smile was to cast it as one fixed thing, a plaster death mask, which as soon...
We are always people that are in the making, constantly adapting to accommodate the roads we walk. As we learn, it changes us. As we go about our course, we grow, and prune everything around us; friends, beliefs, desires. Our past experiences plant t...
There's no evidence from decades of Pew Research surveys that public opinion, in the aggregate, is more extreme now than in the past. But what has changed -- and pretty dramatically -- is the growing tendency of people to sort themselves into politic...
I push him from my mind. This is no act of easy omission on my part; I do not consign him casually to a forgotten past. It is rather an act of will--a kind of self-performed surgery on my soul...the bloodiest of mutilations.
Oh God, Alaska, I love you. I love you," and the Colonel whispered, "I'm so sorry, Pudge. I know you did," and I said, "No. Not past tense." She wasn't even a person anymore, just flesh rotting, but I loved her present tense.
