I had hardly ever seen Great Granny Webster at that time, and yet her feelings interested me. She was little more to me than the silhouette of a formidable old woman dressed in black who appeared occasionally at family gatherings and made us feel tha...
I think it's better if you rely on the fact you belong together, instead of having to reinvent your togetherness every day. People who say right off the bat that they don't want to take risks because their relationship is going to dissolve anyway - w...
When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life, and it is only fair that one has to pay dearly for having assaulted men and things in this manner with Yes and No. Everything is arrang...
Maybe, generations ago, young people rebelled out of some clear motive, but now, we know we’re rebelling. Between teen movies and sex-ed textbooks we’re so ready for our rebellious phase we can’t help but feel it’s safe, contained. It will tu...
Pain is subtle. He has cold grey fingers. His voice is horse from crying & screaming... When people try to avoid him, he follows them silently & turns upas the bartender, or the bus driver... Pain has an elaborate filing system for keeping track of e...
In places where government priorities and market imperatives create a world so capricious that to help a neighbor is to risk your ability to feed your family, and sometimes even your own liberty, the idea of the mutually supportive poor community is ...
If you expand the boundaries of mental illness, which is clealry what has happened in this country during the past twenty-five years, and you treat the people so diagnosed with psychiatric medications, do you run the risk of turning an anger-ridden t...
We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material f...
You never knelt to get anywhere. You are where you are because you're fucking capable, and willing to risk everything to do right, and I'll never be half what you are even if I tried my whole life, and I was walking around thinking I was better than ...
To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense...
sometimes falling rain carries memories of betrayal there in the woods where she was not meant to be too young she believes in her right to be free in her body free from harm believing nature a wilderness she can enter be solaced believing the power ...
Ah! I wish I had the courage to work for the debasement of my contemporaries. What good work it would be to defile their daughters: to insinuate something obscene into the infantile hands which caress each paternal beard and cheek; to poison them, ev...
But some part of him realized, even as he fought to break free from Lupin, that Sirius had never kept him waiting before. . . . Sirius had risked everything, always, to see Harry, to help him. . . . If Sirius was not reappearing out of that archway w...
The only time I get to be alone is while traveling." "Except this week," Charlie said. He turned his head and she saw herself reflected in his shades. "True. And you're not at all what I expected." Not that Connor had had any idea what to expect. But...
He parked the car, pressed the button for the roof to fold back, and undid his seat belt. "It's an emergency." Goldilocks giggled. She unfastened her belt and hopped onto her knees. "Yes, I can see" - she glanced down at his crotch - "That we're in d...
With a gentle touch, she brushed the hair off his forehead. "I was sort of hoping you'd be a little more relaxed today." He took her hand and kissed it. "I'm very relaxed." "Finally?" She raised her eyebrows and snuggled closer. "You feel a little st...
Miss Vesper Holly has the digestive talents of a goat and the mind of a chess master. She is familiar with half a dozen languages and can swear fluently in all of them. She understands the use of a slide rule but prefers doing calculations in her hea...
I know that it's easier to portray a world that's filled with cynicism and anger, where problems are solved with violence. What's a whole lot tougher is to offer alternatives, to present other ways conflicts can be resolved, and to show that you can ...
The biblical lifestyle is always a witness of resistance to the status quo in politics, economics, and all society. It is a witness of resurrection from death. Paradoxically, those who embark on the biblical witness constantly risk death - through ex...
Neurotic identity crises come when our defense mechanisms have been too successful and we're encapsulated in the fortress we have constructed with nothing to refresh us in our solitary confinement. So we play the old movies with their stale fears and...
The word 'survivor' carries a weight of remembrance that has broken the minds and bodies of more than a few men and women. It also contains a humbling light of recognition that compels many to do whatever they can to help reinforce the efforts of tho...