The stories get passed on and the truth gets passed over. As the sayin goes. Which I reckon some would take as meanin that the truth cant compete. but I dont believe that. I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet...
I think fear neutralizes alcohol, weakens its anesthetic power. It's good for small fears; your boss, your wife, your bills, your dentist; all right then to take a drink. But for big ones it doesn't do any good. Like water on blazing gasoline, it wil...
One of them hasn't got a uniform on or plainclothes either like the rest. He has on the white coat that is my nightmare and my horror. And in the crotch of one arm he is upending two long poles intertwined with canvas. The long-drawn-out death within...
No, it was simply that I was uninterested in making, as I saw it, a Xerox of some old emotional state. I was in my mid-thirties, with a marriage more or less behind me. I was no longer vulnerable to curiosity's enormous momentum. I had nothing new to...
Had Mary Shelley fretted so? Maybe yes, maybe no. She’d begun her classic work on a dare. Had culled a dream to bring it into being. But it was not lost on Laura that the story might be a prolonged exercise in Shelley’s personal terrors. The subt...
If writers only dared to dare, a Suetonius or a Tacitus of the Novel could exist, for the Novel is essentially the history of manners, turned into a story and a play, as is History itself often enough. And there is no other difference than this: that...
It was no accident, no coincidence, that the seasons came round and round year after year. It was the Lord speaking to us all and showing us over and over again the birth, life, death, and resurrection of his only begotten Son, our Savior, Jesus Chri...
True love, the good, beautiful, one-and-only kind, the kind between loving friends and family and partners who are mostly just trying hard to do their best, it manages to overlook some pieces of its story. It overlooks what he can’t give you or how...
Can you hear the dreams crackling like a campfire? Can you hear the dreams sweeping through the pine trees and tipis? Can you hear the dreams laughing in the sawdust? Can you hear the dreams shaking just a little bit as the day grows long? Can you he...
Phaedra keeps saying she's being selfish. That she hates herself for it, but she does it anyway. She can't deny herself what she wants, even if it brings about her downfall and his." "And have you learned anything from our literary parallel?" "Not re...
[On famous Nobel Laureate Niels Bohr] [Niels] Bohr's sort of humor, use of parables and stories, tolerance, dependence on family, feelings of indebtedness, obligation, and guilt, and his sense of responsibility for science, community, and, ultimately...
I was always amazed at Cambridge how quickly people appeared to take offence at everything I said, but now I see plainly that it was not my words they hated - it was this fairy face. The dark alchemy of this face turns all my gentle human emotions in...
I wanted to keep looking at her because I wanted to never take my eyes from her, but still I had to lower my eyes, I was so ashamed that even now Jenny was reading my mind so perfectly. 'Listen, that's the only goddamn thing I'm asking, Ollie. Otherw...
Then, instead of telling her that where there was life there was hope, or to let a smile be her umbrella, or that it was always darkest just before the dawn, or anything else that had just lately fallen out of the dog's ass, she simply held her. Beca...
He broke off and eyed with dignified surprise a fine piece of wireless telegraphy between husband and wife. It appeared that Mr. Negget sent off a humorous message with his left eye, the right being for some reason closed, to which Mrs. Negget replie...
Long story short, you will at least get that one unreasonable impulse to prove to yourself that that the invincibility and imperviousness that you feel during youth. It’s something tangible, something that can yield results like in chemistry lab or...
Scientifically, I know beginnings don't exist. The world is made of energy, which is neither created or destroyed. Everything she is was here before me. Everything she was will remain. Her existence touches both my past and my future at one point- in...
It is an old story, that men sell themselves to the tempter, and sign a bond with their blood, because it is only to take effect at a distant day; then rush on to snatch the cup their souls thirst after with an impulse not the less savage because the...
Mailer famously labeled writing the spooky art. He was right. There's a lot of frontal lobe blather, a lot of pencil-sharpening and knuckle-cracking and drafting and chat, but the big decisions are made in the locked subconscious, decisions not just ...
We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is practi...
Piper went a little crazy. She cried out with relief and dove straight into the water. What was she thinking? She didn't take a rope or a life vest or anything. But at the moment, she was just so happy that she paddled over to Leo and kissed him on t...
