The apple . . . came before Adam and Eve in the story of creation. It had to have been there at least three years because that's how long it takes for a new tree to bear fruit.
The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.
There were so many wrongs piling up on both sides, so much of the past being dragged into the present, that living there was like carving the story of your life on to a sepulchral monument.
I suppose I'm in that very small group of people who are not waiting for their own story to unfold. If my life was a film, I'd have walked out by now.
Feelings are like blankets, covering you up so you can't see clearly, or like mazes you can too easily get lost inside. I am terrified of getting lost.
Each letter of the alphabet is a steadfast loyal soldier in a great army of words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories. One letter falls, and the entire language falters.
There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn't. Sometimes the words fly over the fence and all the way out to the feelings.
Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.
So there are countless reasons to remain on this Godforsaken planet that was long considered the only world, if for no other reason than to learn the end of our story: what the author of our lives has not yet taken the trouble to finish.
Death loves death, not life. Dying people love to know that others die with them; it is a comfort to learn you are not alone in the kiln, in the grave.
Whatever she is now she's better than she was," said Bedloe. "Being dead is better than being dull, being dead is better than not being aware.
I’m the thing you most desire, you represent the thing I least desire, death. It’s just the opposite of love.
Looking at her in the hospital he had thought, I don't know you, who you are, does it matter if we live or die?
You have a perfect right to consign us all to hell, rector, but you must allow us the choice of how we get there.
The only means by which one could attain complete happiness is to avoid living in constant expectation of it. It's the expectation that causes our unhappiness and consequent bitterness about life
You knew the sweetness of now, now, TONIGHT! who cares for tomorrow, tomorrow is nothing, yesterday is over and done, tonight live, tonight!
Maybe the Good Friday story is about how God would rather die than be in our sin-accounting business anymore.
She will prolong her life by the length of her story, even though time will wear on inexorably as she tells it, thus depriving her of the chance to have a new experience.
Reiko had not kept a diary and was now denied the pleasure of assiduously rereading her record of the happiness of the past few months and consigning each page to the fire as she did so. - Death in Midsummer and Other Stories
And I feel like a real Dad when I read to her at night. She won't sleep without one story, at least.
Our home tells a story about us, so we may as well take the opportunity to make it a stylish one.
