I thought I was Superman until I experienced that life-changing anaphylactic shock. I was eating lunch and gobbled down a couple of bowls of gumbo. Then, 15 minutes later, I'm in my dorm room resting up. My eyes started itching and my throat was swel...
We all fall into our habits, our routines, our ruts. They're used quite often, consciously or unconsciously, to avoid living, to avoid doing the messy part of having relationships with other people, of dealing with a person next to us. That's why we ...
Work takes different forms. I can spend two or three days without completing anything, and it's choppy: it's filled with all kinds of irrationalities and stupid actions. I have some notion, and then I drop it because something else comes along. I'm f...
Why did I allow the abuse to continue? Even as a teenager? I didn’t. Something that had been plaguing me for years now made sense. It was like the answer to a terrible secret. The thing is, it wasn’t me in my bed, it was Shirley who lay the wonde...
Ray: Harry, I've got an idea. Harry: What? Ray: My room faces out the canal, right? I'm going to go back to me room, jump into the canal, see if I can swim to the other side and escape. Harry: All right. Ray: If you go outside around the corner, you ...
I met two or three men who were very kind to me. There was a magistrate who couldn't stand priests, and a priest who didn't have a good word to say for magistrates; and there was a landlord who let furnished rooms by the hour and spoke highly of both...
Put it in terms of the not-too-serious, if you like. Who got into that locked room? And how was it done? And why should the cup have been moved again? We're up against the essential detective problems of who, how, and why. Simply because there was no...
The shiny black nose of a fox appears through her door before the rest of it steps tentatively across the wooden floor to where she’s cooking. A pile of children’s clothes lie discarded in a corner of the room. The fox knows what she is cooking a...
Hate feeds on your heart and pollutes your mind. It makes you lose sight of reality and forces you to focus on animosity instead of love. Hate makes you less of a person, because the borders of hate are so expansive they leave no room for anything el...
We're always thinking of eternity as an idea that cannot be understood, something immense. But why must it be? What if, instead of all this, you suddenly find just a little room there, something like a village bath-house, grimy, and spiders in every ...
History repeats itself. Someone says this. History throws its shadow over beginning, over the desktop, over the sock drawer with its socks, its hidden letters. history is the little man in a brown suit trying to define a room he is outside of, I know...
I was proud to be brown in my own way. Well, I was at school; at school I was brown about the funky stuff that came with being vegetarian, like being really arrogant about it, declaring proudly to a room full of beefeaters when Mad Cow disease initia...
Desolina and Tony had attended one-room schoolhouses until the third grade. ... According to Tony, there were hardly enough pencils and sober teachers to go around. [Author's grandparents educational background.]
He puffed out his pigeon chest and waddled across the room towards me. With his feet pointing outwards, he looked like a fat duck with a grievance.
But when I was an energetic self-important 10-year-old and found myself in a roomful of grownups, I felt guilty, and thought it only polite to conceal the fun I was having elsewhere. When an aged figure addressed me – they were all aged – I worri...
Oh.” My dad actually looked sheepish. “It’s one o’clock in the morning and I was going to tell you to shut the monkey up and go to bed. I didn’t realise what was going on in here.” “What’s going on in here?” Cameron asked suspicious...
But of what use is it to be whitewashed and trim outside, to have pleasant creepers and tidy shutters, when inside one's soul wanders through empty rooms, mournfully shivers in damp and darkness, is hungry and no one brings it food, is cold and no on...
I feel like I'm going to HURL. Which, even if I wanted to do, I couldn't do, because I haven't eaten. I can't even drag myself out of my room. And while I'd be able to muster the strength to roundhouse Fang until he begged for MERCY, I'de be mush aro...
Walking into my room, I turned and caught his gaze, “But you’re good at walking away, so you obviously haven’t changed.” Pointing to my chin, I indicated, “Except this,” meaning his goatee, “this is new, but you being an asshole, yep- s...
The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or...
I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not...
