Jules lips quivered, and I feared she was about to cry. Then she asked, “He bit off more than he could chew, didn’t he?” She made a motion as if she was biting into a tough piece of steak. Gabriella’s lips sealed shut as she tried to hide her...
As it recurred again and again, it set me thinking of what my architect's books say about the custom in early times to consecrate the choir as soon as it was built, and that the nave, being finished sometimes half a century later, often did not get a...
First she said we were to keep clear of the Sirens, who sit and sing most beautifully in a field of flowers; but she said I might hear them myself so long as no one else did. Therefore, take me and bind me to the crosspiece half way up the mast; bind...
It didn't take me long out there, in the landscapes my father had painted, to realize that as much as I loved my country [Australia], I barely knew it. I'd spent so many years studying the art of our immigrant cultures, and barely any time at all on ...
Some people walk through a hallway with covered mirrors– the hallway is lined with mirrors but there are blankets covering each of them. They go through life believing in an image of themselves that isn't real, and an image of themselves standing i...
People are creators. But I doubt that many realize this. We are not meant to go out into the world and find flawless things, we are not meant to sit down and have flawless things fall into our laps. But we are creators. We can create a beautiful thin...
I believe that the truth is the only force that will set us free. I have hope, not in the tangible or in what I can personally accomplish, but in the faith that battling evil, cruelty, and injustice allows us to retain our identity, a sense of meanin...
I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought feeling after feeling action after action had H. for their object. Now their target ...
In the novelist's profession, as far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as winning or losing. Maybe numbers of copies sold, awards won, and critics' praise serve as outward standards for accomplishment in literature, but none of them really matt...
Her tears fell abundantly--but her grief was so truly artless, that no dignity could have made it more respectable in Emma's eyes--and she listened to her and tried to console her with all her heart and understanding--really for the time convinced th...
Creativity is a magic wand that works two ways. When you set it in action and seek to create something, it does not just brings into existence that object or work, it also raises in your heart a dream, a hope, and a will to achieve that creation. And...
I tell you hopeless grief is passionless, That only men incredulous of despair, Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air Beat upward to God’s throne in loud access Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness In souls, as countries, lieth sil...
Education should aim at destroying free will so that pupils thus schooled, will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished. . . . Influences of the home are obstructiv...
All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on thei...
The memories seem to come in layers. For example, the first memory might be of incest; then they remember robes and candles; next they realize that their father or mother or both were present when they were being abused. Another layer will be the mem...
Most of my friends like words too well. They set them under the blinding light of the poem and try to extract every possible connotation from each of them, every temporary pun, every direct or indirect connection - as if a word could become an object...
I'm not opposed to aging - even though society is kinder on men than women when it comes to getting old. How can I look at aging as the enemy? It happens whether I like it or not and no one is set apart from growing old; it comes to us all. Youth pas...
She sat there reading; cool, calm and collected. "You could ruin his life with that information," her friend reported triumphantly. The woman sighed, clearly annoyed at being interrupted. "If I did he would never forget me," she replied. "Besides...I...
There is the love that I love but don't want to love and try to bleed out so the love that I want but don't want, can die a tragic death. And as it lays dying, I'm touched with remorse, feel regret, and try to keep it beating. If it does, I panic, an...
Colonel Robert G. Shaw: Dear Mother, They learn, learn quickly, faster than white troops it seems to me. They are almost grave and sedate under instruction and they restrain themselves. But the moment they are dismissed from drill every tongue is rel...
Boss Tweed: You may or may not know, Bill, that everyday I go down to the waterfront with hot soup for the Irish as they come ashore. Its part of building a political base. Bill: I've noticed you there, you may have noticed me. Boss Tweed: Indeed I h...
