You're walking funny," Lucy said, a shit-eating grin on her face. Five days of out of this world sex with a starving man could do that to a girl. "You're just jealous." Brenna pushed through the door into DarkRiver's business HQ. Lucy made a mournful...
My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words...
I've been a Christian since I was a little girl. But my Christianity is a muddy mess of thoughts and opinions and making God into what works for me-like going shopping at the mall and picking out whatever I want, putting together faith like I would a...
Here the whole world (stars, water, air, And field, and forest, as they were Reflected in a single mind) Like cast off clothes was left behind In ashes, yet with hopes that she, Re-born from holy poverty, In lenten lands, hereafter may Resume them on...
The library smells like old books-a thousand leather doorways into other worlds." "Dear sir, I was called away and couldn't bring you, but now I feel haunted. I know that sometimes you felt I was a part of you and that losing me would leave a hole in...
My Son,” Aegis stopped him in one of his tantrums. “Anger and rage are powerful. For you they are strength. They will make you stronger than many men, faster than your own horse, and they will show you things beyond your world. But you must contr...
There was a spring in his carefully measured step. He opened the door and let the sunlight in, as if opening himself up, letting pent-up energy out and, letting the world enter inside- letting the light illuminate him. It was strange to see him like ...
I understood, not with my intellect but with my whole being, that no theories of the rationality of existence or of progress could justify such an act; I realized that even if all the people in the world from the day of creation found this to be nece...
Summers was simply a master explainer, able to deftly boil down the complexities of economic and financial, and to put them in terms the non-expert could understand. He was brilliant at cultivating a sense of control, even as events spun far beyond w...
O world! O life! O time! On whose last steps I climb, Trembling at that where I had stood before; When will return the glory of your prime? No more -- Oh, never more! Out of the day and night A joy has taken flight; Fresh spring, and summer, and wint...
Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some object outside of literature. Writing as a sylistic exercise seemed barren to me. Poetry as the art of the word made me yawn. I also understood that I...
God, the bitter misery that reading works into this world! Everybody knows that - everbody who IS everybody. All the best minds have been off reading for years. Look at the swing La Rouchefoucauld took at it. He said that if nobody had ever learned t...
She had taken him for granted, she thought with surprise and shame, watching the flickering candlelight. She had assumed his kindness was so natural and so innate, she had never asked herself whether it cost him any effort. Any effort to stand betwee...
That's what dreams are really like, you know? They're not full of melting clocks or floating roses or people made out of rocks. Most of the time, dreams look just like the normal world. It's your feelings that tell you something's off. Not your mind,...
I ease into the idea of letting go of control and simply let life take the reins. And when I don't hold it so tightly, it doesn't thrash against me so wildly. It calms to a trot and allows me to take in the scenery, experience love, and learn what is...
And in it all, the sensation of shaking my fists at the sky, shaking my fists high up to the sky, because that is what we do when someone dies too early, too beautiful, too undervalued by the world, or sometimes just at all -- we shake our fists at t...
The question of why evil exists is not a theological question, for it assumes that it is possible to go behind the existence forced upon us as sinners. If we could answer it then we would not be sinners. We could make something else responsible...The...
Hema thought of Shiva, her personal deity, and how the only sensible response to the madness of life . . . was to cultivate a kind of madness within, to perform the mad dance of Shiva, . . . to rock and sway and flap six arms and six legs to an inner...
My sister stood up, trembling, and I must admit that I expected her familiar sneer to have taken its usual place on her face. But all I could find there was unhappiness and fear. Fear of my reaction, perhaps. But when a person has lived a life like h...
And a strange, deadly war is raging around the world. Yet, each person who has lost a loved one surely knows secretly, deeply, that no war, no act of revenge, no daisy-cutters dropped on someone else’s loved ones or someone else’s children, will ...
I’d do almost anything for you,” Simon said quietly. “I’d die for you. You know that. But would I kill someone else, someone innocent? What about a lot of innocent lives? What about the whole world? Is it really love to tell someone that if i...