But I was awake, sitting by the window looking down at the trailer and Mr. Zoltan's truck. I could not sleep. That is how it is with folks my age. We take naps during the day, and then we cannot sleep at night. I think that it is because God is getti...
Why had we let it go? Why had we both been condemned...to an exile among dreary strangers who had made us give up all desire for rest, for friendship, for the sound of human voices? Could I now reclaim a single hour spent talking to my brother, Phili...
Wow," Puck mused, standing beside me. "The River of Dreams." ... Moons, comets and constellations rippled on the surface, and other, stranger things floated upon the misty black waters. Petals and book pages, butterfly wings and silver medals. The hi...
Looking back, I wish that everyone could have that sort of moment: a moment where you realize that your hands are so impossibly small and this world is so impossibly big. And the two don’t seem to add up. Maybe recognizing the smallness of your own...
I could feel God. It was like he was setting fine fingerprints all over the moment. I could feel him in it, as if he were saying to me, “Girl, I’m gonna blow the hinges off anything you think a love letter is, was , or could be. If you would just...
Agape" is loving a person for exactly who they are - not who we hope they'll become with enough fixing. It's this idea that every person has their layers, so you can never confine a person to only what you know about them from the first glance. It's ...
The Detective was different. Not that he wasn't a good man; Willie had heard enough about him to understand that he was the kind who didn't like to turn away from another's pain, the kind who couldn't put a pillow over his ears to drown out the cries...
It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more then half of the people in the position H's family was in...
These stories, I realized, were lost. Nobody was going to know that part of the city but as a place where a bomb went off. The bomb was going to become the story of this city. That's how we lose the city - that's how our knowledge of what the world i...
How sweet the morning air is! See how that one little cloud floats like a pink feather from some gigantic flamingo. Now the red rim of the sun pushes itself over the London cloud-bank. It shines on a good many folk, but on none, I dare bet, who are o...
Almsgiving is a major tenet of Islam. It's also a kick in the pants of the highest order. Nothing is as cool as skimming off a couple of hundred thousand from some multinational corporation and handing it out to random strangers. Or writing a harmles...
New Rule: The Napa Valley is Disneyland for alcoholics. Be honest, you're not visiting wineries in four days because you're an oenophile, you're doing it because you're a drunk. It's the only place in America where you can pass out in a stranger's ho...
In my own life, as winters turn into spring, I find it not only hard to cope with mud but also hard to credit the small harbingers of larger life to come, hard to hope until the outcome is secure. Spring teaches me to look more carefully for the gree...
Why keep in touch with them? That's what I want to know,' asked Larry despairingly. 'What satisfaction does it give you? They're all either fossilized or mental.' 'Indeed, they're not mental,' said Mother indignantly. 'Nonsense, Mother... Look at Aun...
He knew all the stories. His grandfather had given them to him when he sat between the old man’s knees as a child. It was a comfort, though, to hear them again. To call them to mind. All these stories that made him more than just a vintner and more...
A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we're married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, ...
Dr. Jules Hilbert: Hell Harold, you could just eat nothing but pancakes if you wanted. Harold Crick: What is wrong with you? Hey, I don't want to eat nothing but pancakes, I want to live! I mean, who in their right mind in a choice between pancakes a...
As if this great outburst of anger had purged all my ills, killed all my hopes, I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world- and finding it so much like m...
It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel i...
The gaze of others is quite without indulgence for our defects and that of Mantegna is pitiless. I am grateful to him. Harshness, in the realm of the arts, is a virtue, and it is sometimes a good thing to see oneself as one is. My stupor, however, co...
The thing is, when you’re with someone like Poppu - someone who sees straight through your battered facade and loves every bit of you, someone who makes you laugh until you pee your pants, someone who grabs you in a hug exactly when you need it - y...
