The mysterious manner in which this growing sense of unity commingles with a sense of utter goodness is worth noting. It arises by no effort of mine; rather does it come to me out of I know not where. Harmony appears gradually and flows through my wh...
How they are all about, these gentlemen In chamberlains' apparel, stocked and laced, Like night around their order's star and gem And growing ever darker, stony-faced, And these, their ladies, fragile, wan, but propped High by their bodice, one hand ...
My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you – I am forgetful of everything but seeing you again – my Life seems to stop there – I see no further. You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was disso...
I take in his smooth cheeks, his rough chin and jaw, the developing wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. 'We fall in love with somebody who maybe seems like a bad match,' Tully says, 'and our friends run around saying 'What does he see in her?' What ...
So at family gatherings… I try to stick to the acceptable script. Indeed, I discover that the less I say, the happier everyone seems to be with me. I sometimes wonder if I wouldn’t have been better off as a paraplegic or afflicted by some tragic ...
The Greenland fjords are peculiar for the spells of completely quiet weather, when there is not enough wind to blow out a match and the water is like a sheet of glass. The kayak hunter must sit in his boat without stirring a finger so as not to scare...
I am trying now to be entirely honest. I did actually comfort in the thought that the Devil had, on Strawless Common, defeated God. I much preferred that thought to the thought that God hadn't cared, hadn't helped Robin. I thought all the way back to...
The Bretton Woods saga unfurled at a unique crossroads in modern history. An ascendant anticolonial superpower, the United States, used its economic leverage over an insolvent allied imperial power, Great Britain, to set the terms by which the latter...
To this I replied, "I still think that my body is not merely a sensory appearance, for surely it came from my parents, who were its cause and condition." , "If you think that your body came from your father and mother, then what are the beginning and...
Teaching English is (as professorial jobs go) unusually labor-intensive and draining. To do it well, you have to spend a lot of time coaching students individually on their writing and thinking. Strangely enough, I still had a lot of energy for this ...
This other man he could never see in his entirety but he seemed an artisan and a worker in metal. The judge enshadowed him where he crouched at his trade but he was a coldforger who worked with hammer and die, perhaps under some indictment and an exi...
Mother." Alec's voice as he interrupted his mother was firm, implacable, and not unkind. "Father. There's something I have to tell you." He smiled at them. "I'm seeing someone." Robert Lightwood looked at his son with some exasperation. "Alec," he sa...
Jem grinned. “Where have you been? The Blue Dragon? The Mermaid?” “The Devil Tavern if you must know.” Will sighed and leaned against one of the posts of the bed. “I had such plans for the evening. The pursuit of blind drunkenness and waywa...
We hang on to our values, even if they seem at times tarnished and worn; even if, as a nation and in our own lives, we have betrayed them more often that we care to remember. What else is there to guide us? Those values are our inheritance, what make...
My prayers, my tears, my wishes, fears, and lamentations, were witnessed by myself and heaven alone. When we are harassed by sorrows or anxieties, or long oppressed by any powerful feelings which we must keep to ourselves, for which we can obtain and...
Every story is an act of trust between a writer and a reader: each story, in the end, is social. Whatever a writer sets down can help or harm a community of which he or she is a part. When I write I can imagine a child in California wishing to give a...
So I thought I’d feel different afterward, after the visible neon sign proclaiming 'virgin' had blinked out on my forehead. I’d spent years obessessing about it, so it seemed like somthing should have changed. Maybe it would have if I’d still b...
I always hear people talk about 'dysfunctional families.' It annoys me, because it makes you think that somewhere there's this magical family where everyone gets along, and no one ever screams things they don't mean, and there's never a time when sha...
But somebody else had spoken Snape’s name, quite softly. “Severus . . .” The sound frightened Harry beyond anything he had experienced all evening. For the first time, Dumbledore was pleading. Snape gazed for a moment at Dumbledore, and there w...
The fireworks continued to burn and spread all over the school that afternoon. Though they caused plenty of disruption, the other teachers did not seem to mind them very much. "Dear, dear," said Professor McGonagall sardonically, as one of the dragon...
You can only arrive at mastery by practicing the techniques you have learned, facing challenges and apprehending them, using to the fullest the tools you have been taught, until they shatter in your hands and you are left in the midst of wreckage abs...
