The process of putting the thing you value most in the world out for the assessment of strangers is a confidence-shaking business even in the best of times. But in Lucy's circumstances it was sheer heroism, a real sign of her devotion to her art. She...
I’ve often wondered why more science textbooks don’t tell teenagers that the only thing sharks like to eat more than fish, are dead prostitutes.
It is in the quiet moments of reflection that we can gain a greater feeling of hope when we remember and recognize all the positive things that are happening during this time of great difficulty.
And her delicacy offended. Who wants a delicate whore! Claude would even ask you to turn your face away when she squatted over the bidet. All wrong! A man, when he's burning up with passion, wants to see things; he wants to see everything, even how t...
My choices, it seemed, were to be branded a sinner and live my life alone; to abandon my faith, the one thing I held most dear in the entire world; or to lie to everyone, pretend I was straight, and forget about it all.
All the while she wondered if any strange good thing might come of her being in her ancestral land; and some spirit within her rose automatically as the sap in the twigs. It was unexpected youth, surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringin...
He grew away from old associations, and saw something new in life and humanity. Secondarily, he made close acquaintance with phenomena which he had before known but darkly - the seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon, winds in th...
It was uncertain. She was in her early forties. Breast cancer. No one could identify exactly how everyone had come to know this fact. Was it a fact? Some people called it rumor. But in fact there was no such thing as rumor. There was fact, and there ...
We all knew there was a good deal of pointlessness to nearly all the meetings and in fact one meeting out of every three or four was nearly perfectly without gain or purpose but many meetings revealed the one thing that was necessary and so we attend...
Psychological man may be going nowhere, but he aims to achieve a certain speed and certainty in going. Like his predecessor, the man of the market economy, he understands morality as that which is conducive to increased activity. The important thing ...
So as a seventh grader, no, you weren't friends with people you didn't like. But sometimes you also weren't friends with people you did like, which was complicated, and which didn't make any sense if you tried to explain it. Sometimes things just cha...
The basements of the churches I've loved reveal the foundation of the spiritual life to be not belief so much as engagement with the mystery lurking at the base of all things. We build a framework on top of mystery because we need someplace to live, ...
Where moments before the bright morning sun flickered through the branches of the huge oak trees surrounding the property, every-thing in a ten yard radius immediately went pitch dark. The air, already a chilly fifty degrees, dropped past freezing in...
I'd give anything right now to go back, even just for a few moments, so I could pay more attention. Inscribe every detail of him, and of us together, onto my heart, where I could keep it safe always. Where even time couldn't erase it.
Hi. I'm here to enlist. You can't. You aren't human. You see, little fella, we don't do sociological stuff like "interspeciated workplaces." We're a crack company of space mercenaries. We do "hurting people" and "breaking things." Sounds like my kind...
I already told you it's over, he snaps. What else do you want? A maldito corpse? You women never know how to leave things alone. You never know how to let go.
So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass-powered organism and turning it into the last thing we need: another fossil fuel machine. This one, howeve...
But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost.
. . . .how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world--and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life afford quite a...
Nature is fine in love, fine as in thin and delicate, as in not firm. We move to attach, more than we understand, to things and people we love that we feel might be an anchoring point for this fine, precious love. When those anchors disappear, a part...
Maybe I'm not so different from everyone else after all. It's like somebody gave me a puzzle, but I don't have the box with the picture on it. So I don't know what the final thing is supposed to look like. I'm not even sure if I have all the pieces.
