It was the first time I had ever seen someone die, and it wasn't what I expected...I stood there waiting for something momentous to happen, for someone to say something profound, but there was nothing...I still had the childish notion that since my l...
I had a dream about you. Too many people died that night to count. Still, I had to provide the Minister of Numbers with a rough estimate. The number I told him was two, and that number may be off by one or two people. In the dream, nobody could find ...
And what I thought most about was luxury. I had never realised before that it is more than just having things; it makes the very air feel different. And I felt different, breathing the air: relaxed, lazy, still sad but with the edge taken off the sad...
crawling up into daddy's lap when dad was still DADDY nodding my head against his chest soaking in the comfort of his heart LISTENING to the thump...thump somewhere beneath muscle and breastbone I remember his arms their sublime ENCIRCLING and the sh...
Darling, my darling, don't think that I don't love you or that I didn't love you, but it's precisely because I love you that I couldn't have become what I am today if you were still here. It's impossible to have a child and despise the world as it is...
He openned the door that he assumed was the garage only to find himself in the pantry. crap. "Um . . . grabbing some Pop-Tarts for the road," Nick said, covering his mistake. Still, they both stared at him as if he'd escaped Arkham Asylum. Offering t...
Dead men cannot take effective action; their power of influence on others lasts only till the grave. Deeds and actions that energise others belong only to the living. Well, then, look at the facts in this case. The Saviour is working mightily among m...
In a funny way, Dad was always a bow-tie wearer, always a little more traditional than you might imagine. Because even though he had blue hair and tattoos and wore leather jackets and worked in a record store, he wanted to marry Mom back at a time wh...
We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last - the power to refuse our consent. So we must certainly wash o...
I thought that some of the hymns bespoke the true religion of the place. The people didn't really want to be saints of self-deprivation and hatred of the world. They knew that the world would sooner or later deprive them of all it had given them, but...
Don't ever cancel my call again! I told you I would talk to you, you should have waited..." Shit. Shit. Shit. "Mr. Edge, it is 5pm, I assumed my working day was done and I cancelled the phone call by accident, this phone is new, still working it out"...
Beowulf stands out as a poem which makes extensive use of this kind of figurative language. There are over one thousand compounds in the poem, totalling one-third of all the words in the text. Many of these compounds are kennings. The word 'to ken' i...
It matters not at all that I do not want to marry, that I am afraid of the wedding, afraid of consummating the marriage, afraid of childbirth, afraid of everything about being a wife. Nobody even asks if I have lost my childhood sense of vocation, if...
The young are right if they have little confidence in the ideas which rule most of their elders. But they are mistaken or misled when they believe that these are still the liberal ideas of the nineteenth century, which, in fact, the younger generatio...
Finally, her father spoke. “Are you sure? I mean, I don’t understand how this could have happened. She’s only fifteen; I didn’t even know she was sexually active.” Mallory’s father, normally in control, was on the verge of tears. He refus...
This point is often missed by evangelical feminists. They conclude that a difference in function necessarily involves a difference in essence; i.e., if men are in authority over women, then women must be inferior. The relationship between Christ and ...
It’s possible that the reason I've never experienced a ghostly presence is that my temporal lobes aren't wired for it. It could well be that the main difference between skeptics (Susan Blackmore notwithstanding) and believers is the neural structur...
Violators cannot live with the truth: survivors cannot live without it. There are those who still, once again, are poised to invalidate and deny us. If we don't assert our truth, it may again be relegated to fantasy. But the truth won't go away. It w...
One of the few things I still miss from my Midwest childhood was this weird, deluded but unshakable conviction that everything around me existed all and only . Am I the only one who had this queer deep sense as a kid? -- that everything exterior to m...
I had lunch with my brothers,” Mark said, his face serious. “While you were still asleep. They told me. About Corey and that stupid set-up you agreed to where you’d pretend not to be my wife . . .” “I never agreed to pretend not to be your ...
Cinema is a mixed form. L'Avventura has characters, it has social context, and these things are not trivial. Its plot is the disappearance of a disappearance. Possibly the most frightening plot imaginable. Forgetting the dead, whom all of history tel...
