...the place I was bound for on my latest pilgrimage was filled with living, first-hand memories of all the enchanted years that lie between two and eighteen. How enchanted those years are is made more and more clear to me the older I grow. There has...
Offer it up personally,then. Right now. I thought of how many people go to their graves unforgiven and unforgiving. I thought of how many people have had siblings or friends or children or lovers disappear from their lives before precious words of cl...
Addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based love story. It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows upon you a heady, hallucinogenic dose of something you never even dared to admit that you wanted—an emotional speedball, perhap...
[I]t must be owned, that liberty is the perfection of civil society; but still authority must be acknowledged essential to its very existence: and in those contests, which so often take place between the one and the other, the latter may, on that acc...
Books took, in her young life, the place of companions and childish games. She read a great deal without guidance or discrimination, and gained all her ideas on life, all her faith, all her ideals and aims and aspirations from books. Books stood betw...
Gundar seemed to come to a decision. "Well, as my old mam used to say, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, it's probably a duck." "Very wise," Halt said. "And what exactly do your mother's words of wisdom have to do ...
I read everything in that dusty little library. I read the prologues and the epilogues until I could tell you how many times Stephen King thanked his wife, Tabitha. I could tell you how the Columbia Indians made their long-houses, or how to make a so...
I feel ugly” I said and you looked at me as if I spoke a different language. There are things you will never understand and if there were words to describe the rapture that takes place in my head from time to time I would put my hand in front of yo...
A father acts on behalf of his children by working, providing, intervening, struggling, and suffering for them. In so doing, he really stands in their place. He is not an isolated individual, but incorporates the selves of several people in his own s...
Will robot teachers replace human teachers? No, but they can complement them. Moreover, the could be sufficient in situations where there is no alternative––to enable learning while traveling, or while in remote locations, or when one wishes to s...
He paused and let out a little sigh. Then I’m saying it wrong, because it has everything to do with you. I want what Hades and Persephone had, and I can’t do it without you. The only time the queen of the Everneath has been overthrown is when an ...
For deep adherents, the Koran would seem to echo great truths given directly to a vaunted and hallowed prophet by a deity of overwhelming power and grandeur. If you don’t hold any such archaic notions, however, the words attributed to Allah come ac...
The skin is a variety of contingency: in it, through it, with it, the world and my body touch each other, the feeling and the felt, it defines their common edge. Contingency means common tangency: in it the world and the body intersect and caress eac...
Dove held out a hand to Johnson, and he took it—not because they were fleeing a fire and not because she was holding a million dollars. He took her hand to wrap his fingers around hers. His long, long fingers. Her knees went a little watery. Johnso...
With a shudder of excitement, and without giving herself a moment to second-guess what she was about to do, she reached up to take his face in her hands and pressed her lips to his. For a frozen moment he didn’t react, and she could feel her heart ...
There are five people you meet in heaven," the Blue Man suddenly said. "Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on Earth." Eddie looked confu...
But even if I know what governs their trajectory, if I know the rules of the movement of things and how things are organized and how certain mutations, transformations, gestations take place, even if I know all that, I shall only have learnt how to g...
I can think of no sadder example of our food paradigm than two posters taped to the window of a California IHOP. One is a colorful photo of pancakes heaped with bananas, strawberries, nuts, syrups and whipped cream with the caption, 'Welcome to Parad...
American schools in Guam, both before 1941 and after 1945, were established to eradicate the Chamoru, tongue and person. To educate the old Chamoru out of the new American. The native out of the patriot...But the nastier lesson their schools taught w...
I've always loved strong women, which is lucky for me because once you're over about twenty-five there is no other kind. Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and k...
Venice appeared to me as in a recurring dream, a place once visited and now fixed in memory like images on a photographer’s plates so that my return was akin to turning the leaves of a portfolio: a scene of the gondolas moored by the railway statio...
