I don't know why people are so shy about expressing openly in front of the world their longing for each other, the most powerful and tender natural attraction, but they pretend to be proud or indifferent and they don't consider, especially if they're...
Take a moment and think of something small but significant that you've wanted for decades. Dream about it. Wish for it. Let the dreaming and wishing sink deeply into your being. Add some memories of disappointment just for a little flavor. At some po...
Wooing, wedding, and repenting is as a Scotch jig, a measure, and a cinque-pace: the first suit is hot and hasty like a Scotch jig--and full as fantastical; the wedding, mannerly modest, as a measure, full of state and ancientry; and then comes repen...
The monkish vows keep us far from that sink of vice that is the female body, but often they bring us close to other errors. Can I finally hide from myself the fact that even today my old age is still stirred by the noonday demon when my eyes, in choi...
I want to remember warming your two a.m. bottle, clipping your locks, watching you be baptized, bathing you in the big porcelain sink… how I often laid you against my chest and felt the cradlesong of your tiny breaths as you fell asleep . . .
Dinner was served on mismatched plates with paper napkins and silverware that looked like it had been stolen from a school cafeteria. The spaghetti was from a box that was still poking out of the garbage pail, the sauce from a jar that was sitting be...
Maybe that's why he had started to fear suffocation. It wasn't so much drowning in the earth or sea but the feeling that he was sinking into too many expectations, literally getting in over his head. Wow...when he started having thoughts like that, h...
Bonnie saw ropes hanging loose, poles falling away, tree-tops sinking beneath her. As they rose, the sun rose with them. Its warmth turned the dark skin of the fiery balloon midnight blue. They flew straight up. Above them, the sweet, clear music of ...
We human beings glimpse lofty ideals, catch ourselves betraying them, and sink to suicidal despair--despair from which only the love of our friends can save us, since friends see in us those nobler qualities we ourselves, out of long familiarity, hav...
The first effect of the mind growing cultivated is that processes once multiple get to be performed in a single act. Lazarus has called this the progressive 'condensation' of thought. ... Steps really sink from sight. An advanced thinker sees the rel...
That's what courage is. Taking your disappointments and your failures, your guilt and your shame, all the wounds received and inflicted, and sinking them in the past. Starting again. Damning yesterday and facing tomorrow with your head held high. Tim...
He had a new girl, and I told him she looked like Marilyn Monroe. He smiled because he thought I meant she was beautiful, and I smiled because I meant she looked like a corpse.
When the clock reads 3:00, I don’t call it three o’clock, I call it three hundred, and I remember the Spartans. At 3:01, however, I remember what I was doing at 2:59, and I get back to it.
I lit my loneliness on fire like it was a cigarette. But I didn’t smoke it, because that would have required me to remove my gas mask. And what kind of sensible girl is going to be attracted to a guy out in public not wearing his gas mask?
I had a dream about you last night. We started a shoe company, and a competitor (probably someone from Nike) attacked you, so I had to stab them in the throat with a shoelace. I guess it would have been better to use that shoelace to strangle them. �...
It’s amazing that a thin film of plastic wrap is enough to protect food against the aggression of hungry marauders. Or maybe the plastic cover doesn’t act as a shield, but rather the starving mob is staved off by one simple word: Leftovers.
I’m like a staircase, she was like an elevator, and our relationship never escalated above friendship. I’d like to think we’ll one day be a couple, but I’m not going to wear a fishbowl on my head and dream about it. That wouldn’t be fair to...
The idea began to sink in, more than it ever had, that I might be crazy, in the traditional sense of the word. That I might be, forever and ever amen, a Crazy Person. That's what we'd suspected all along, what I'd been working so hard to disprove, wh...
There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about ...
As I obsess about my ancient problems, I feel more like I'm sinking in quicksand than lighting a torch. I'm creating neither heat nor light, just the icky, perversely pleasurable squish of self-pity between my toes. My only defense is that I'm not th...
What happens when you let go, when your strength leaves you and you sink into darkness, when there's nothing that you or anyone else can do, no matter how desperate you are, no matter how you try? Perhaps it's then, when you have neither pride nor po...
