It wasn’t until I’d walked halfway across the parking lot that I realized: 1. I wasn’t wearing shoes. A. Or a shirt. 2. I didn’t bring my keys A. Or anything really. 3. I’d just left a complete stranger in m...
There was something about the people you grew up around, the ones you'd seen throughout your childhood, the folks you couldn't remember not knowing. Even if the past was a complicated mess, as you aged, you were just glad the sons of bitches were sti...
...and on some nights in bed, in that moment before sleep erased the day, I would picture the way the sky in Lapland looked the morning I left, how the train had sped south beneath a sky that was brighter than it had been in weeks. It had pulsed with...
No one stepping for the first time into a room made of books can know instinctively how to behave, what is expected, what is promised, what is allowed. One may be overcome by horror--at the cluster or the vastness, the stillness, the mocking reminder...
He thinks money spent on a home is money wasted. He's lived too much in hotels. Never the best hotels, of course. Second-rate hotels. He doesn't understand a home. He doesn't feel at home in it. And yet, he wants a home. He's even proud of having thi...
On my solemn oath, Edmund, I'd gladly face not having an acre of land to call my own, nor a penny in the bank, I'd be willing to have no home but the poorhouse in my old age, if I could look back now on having been the fine artist I might have been.
If he spoke, he knew that he would break the spell. As soon as she knew her Romeo wasn’t coming she would be disappointed. She would doubtless be angry with him, perhaps even sense that it was somehow his fault. But at this moment she was happy and...
If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a phil...
You must not think of time as a quantity, a period, a measure. Look at the sky," Gwynneth said. "The moon has now slipped away to another night, into another world. It was not the time it was here that you remember, Faolan, but rather the luminescenc...
Walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the same street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attentio...
I miss you so much in these wee morning hours, when the depth of the night sets my spirit free. When the forest is dark, and there doesn’t have to be anything in the world but the beauty I pull out of it. I miss you throughout the day, as I come ac...
You want to know a secret?" "Always." "My real name is Dave." "I see." "This doesn't seem to amuse you." "I met Jeremy the troll a few nights ago." "Seriously?" "Seriously. Also known as the Mighty Raaaarrggh! Although...I can sorta see why you chang...
How must it have felt, Pikes, the night they seized your films, like entrails yanked from the camera, out of your guts, clutching them in coils and wads to stuff them up a stove to burn away! Did it feel as bad as having some fifty thousand books ann...
The rockets set the bony meadows afire, turned rock to lava, turned wood to charcoal, transmuted water to steam, made sand and silica into green glass which lay like shattered mirrors reflecting the invasion, all about. The rockets came like drums, b...
Yet what happened in fact? In the middle of the night John woke up and saw me sleeping beside him with no doubt a look of peace on my face, even of bliss, bliss is not unattainable in this world. He saw me—saw me as I was at that moment—took frig...
My prayers are answered. No: a glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a mountain road by night, a glimpse of the next three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon. And there must perhaps always be just enough lack of demonstrativ...
Blobfish, the guy who snapped a hamsters neck, myself, the homeless guy who has never thrown a punch (but has killed a fox) and Dickface, the man obsessed with trees and touching himself in public, follow an arrogant midget into the home of a pale cr...
I didn't say another word to Mama that night, but I could feel something good even then: the YES in my heart, the swirling-around in my belly, the prickly tingling all the way from the freckle on my finger to the tip of my pinky toe. That much wonder...
So you're here by yourself?" “Yes." “Seems like an odd place to come by yourself." “I needed to get away." “Woman trouble? That's another of my father's expressions." “No, actually. I poisoned my neighbor's dogs." After a moment she said, �...
Annabelle gave him a chiding smile. “If you’re implying that I’m spoiled, I assure you that I am not.” “You should be.” His warm gaze slid over her pink-tinted face and slender upper body, then sought hers again. There was a note in his v...
She looked so disappointed, so grieved and desperate that Clem longed to comfort her, only he couldn't think of thing to say that she hadn't heard a hundred times from Dad and Dr. Snow and Mrs. Mack: how things would get better in time, though no one...
