We're meant to stay connected to our hearts, you see. Feeling our feelings, present in the moments we're given. But we don't do that. And that's when we get in trouble. ... We mature and take responsibility for ourselves and others, and that's a good...
If instead of arranging the atoms in some definite pattern, again and again repeated, on and on, or even forming little lumps of complexity like the odor of violets, we make an arrangement which is always different from place to place, with different...
And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If ...
Nor when love is of this disinterested sort is there any disgrace in being deceived, but in every other case there is equal disgrace in being or not being deceived. For he who is gracious to his lover under the impression that he is rich, and is disa...
Sitting on the train I watch the scenery speeding by, notice a cobweb in the top corner of the window, undulating with a gentle breeze I can’t feel. I lean back in my seat and take my book out of the carrier bag. Turning it over in my hand, it feel...
They all know the truth, that there are only three subjects worth talking about. At least here in these parts," he says, "The weather, which, as they're farmers, affects everything else. Dying and birthing, of both people and animals. And what we eat...
From the standpoint of integrity, I think we all need to own up to our dirty little secrets. I believe that when we are open about our own strange desires or unusual lives, it paves the way for others to do the same. In the past thirty years, gay men...
The human eye has to be one of the cruelest tricks nature ever pulled. We can see a tiny, cone-shaped area of light right in front of our faces, restricted to a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can’t see around walls, we can’t...
To be a full-blooded hillbilly was to be a living koan. Half of you wanted to be dignified and half of you couldn’t tolerate any restraint. You could see it in the regional art and hear it in the music. Wood carving with chainsaws. Cloggers who dan...
We can't lose you," she said after a few moments of awkward as hell silence. "You have to understand that we aren't doing this because we don't care about Kat. We're doing this because we love you." "But I love her," I said without hesitation. Dee's ...
Reading all my old love letters was disorienting. You remember thinking the thoughts and writing the words but, man, you can't TOUCH those feelings. Its like they belonged to someone else. Someone you don't even know. I'm aware, in an intellectual wa...
He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that w...
I want you to know that if I could've stayed with you I would have. I fought as hard as I could. I will never understand why I had to be taken from you so soon, but I have accepted it. Yet I want you to know that there is nothing more important to me...
For the next nine months, Sylvia would report on campus trends, politics, tastes, style. It was an honor, but it was grueling. Sylvia was overworked. She had boyfriend problems. She longed for Europe. She broke her leg in a skiing accident. Her best ...
We tell each other everything. You take the rap for bad things I do, we have this amazing time together and then all day in classes you ignore me like I don't exist. And I have to watch you and Sally together, and you licking her arse and not telling...
The ceremony was fast so we wouldn't be caught. When it was over, the men all whispered 'Mazel tov' and climbed back onto their shelves. I went up to the boy and pressed the wooden horse into his hands, the only present I could give him. The boy look...
Lucy paused, hands full of green beans, her memory flashing back to the giant pots of crawfish on the stove. Her Mama’s green eyes would squint into the steam, hair pulled back, a frown of concentration on her face. The salted water was flavored an...
...Des felt a familiar feeling in the pit of his stomach. All soldiers felt the same thing going into battle, whether they admitted it or not: fear. Fear of failure, fear of dying, fear of watching their friends die, fear of being wounded and living ...
12. Historians today rely on classics like Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, Caesar’s Gallic War, and Tacitus’s Histories. The earliest copies we have for these date from 1,300, 900, and 700 years after the original writing, respect...
It is a fact that if an impulse from one or the other sphere comes up and is not lived out, then it goes back down and tends to develop anti-human qualities. What should have been a human impulse becomes a tiger-like impulse. For instance, a man has ...
And speaking of this wonderful machine: [840] I’m puzzled by the difference between Two methods of composing: , the kind Which goes on solely in the poet’s mind, A testing of performing words, while he Is soaping a third time one leg, and , The o...
