What happend to her? To Miranda?' Ulysses shrugged. 'What happens to most children. She got sick, and never got better.' 'And your wife?' 'The same.' 'But you said you were married,' said Will, glancing down at Ulysses's ring, smooth and lustrous in ...
The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still cha...
And secretly I fell prey to the one of the besetting sins of western intellectuals, which normally I abhor: I began to experience envy of suffering, that profoundly dishonest emotion which derives from the foolish notion that only the oppressed can a...
Dissociation can enable us to withstand pain and loss under which we would otherwise break. It enables us to survive and pull through. But, a habit of continual dissociation – especially after the trauma has passed – leads to the shut-in feeling ...
Already he knew something of the history of the intervening years. He had heard now of the moral decay that had followed the collapse of supernatural religion in the minds of ignoble man, the decline of public honour, the ascendency of wealth. For me...
The other night my grandpa stopped breathing. I thought he was trying to set a world record for holding his breath, but after ten minutes of me cheering him on, he had to be boring and go and die on us and totally spoil our dinner. The good news was ...
Here was the world-famous novelist with her penchant for detail; yet, in her observations of a prostitute with a customer, she had failed to come away with the most important detail of all. She could never identify the murderer; she could barely desc...
It's only a heartache. It isn't a tragedy. A tragedy would be losing the father of my children to cancer. This I wrestle with the hardest. There are thirty-one flavors of pain, like Baskin Robbins in hell. Am I allowed to feel pain at a breakup? When...
What are the chances that of all 1.59629 quadrillion square feet of physical land on planet Earth, three major world religions are literally fighting over one single rock?
The true terror Jonah thought the true mystery of life was not that we are all going to die but that we were all born that we were all once little babies like this unknowing and slowly reeling in the world gathering it loop by loop like a ball of str...
Lenin and Stalin created the idiosyncratic Soviet system in the image of their ruthless little circle of conspirators before the Revolution. Indeed much of the tragedy of Leninism-Stalinism is comprehensible only if one realizes that the Bolsheviks c...
There is a power that can be created out of pent-up indignation, courage, and the inspiration of a common cause, and that if enough people put their minds and bodies into that cause, they can win. It is a phenomenon recorded again and against in the ...
You fight, work, sweat, nearly kill yourself, sometimes do kill yourself, trying to accomplish something — and you can’t. Not from any fault of yours. You simply can do nothing, neither great nor little — not a thing in the world — not even m...
And so, at least symbolically, the blood of Eve courses through each one of her daughters' veins. We are each associated with life; each subject to the impossible expectations and cruel projections of men; each fallen, blamed, and misunderstood; and ...
My body slid from human to wolf in a crack! of black smoke. Wolf was panting and I watched frost dissipate on my hot tongue, sending tiny rivulets of steam into the air. The world was sharp and clear, and I never realized how many different colors of...
If patriotism were defined, not as blind obedience to government, not as submissive worship to flags and anthems, but rather as love of one's country, one's fellow citizens (all over the world), as loyalty to the principles of justice and democracy, ...
At no point does anyone in the chain know what to do with money in the real economy. But in an indefinite world, people actually prefer unlimited optionality; money is more valuable than anything you could possibly do with it. Only in a definite futu...
The coma carried me into a world where time and space seemed to vanish; it was a dreamlike existence in which people, places, and situations shifted as quickly as thoughts. I had a profound sense of being at a crossroads, a turning point, somewhere b...
Strange combination, isn't it--gratitude and resentment? But this is the way I think. Actually, I think everybody thinks that way. Even the children of the humans who died long ago, I think they lived their lives holding similar contradictory thought...
The faint pink coating the treetops promised rippling buds, a sure sign of spring hastening in, right on schedule, and the animal world getting ready for its fiesta of courting and mating, dueling and dancing, suckling and grubbing, costume-making an...
The bells cease, and the power goes from me, and I descend again to the world of the living; and if in some foolish confiding moment I try to explain why I want to re-live those old days, to tear the Truth out of the past so that all men shall see pl...
