Jesus, you never fail to surprise me, baby.” He’s supporting the heavy bike, and us, with his strong legs braced on either side. He reaches between us and rips my yoga pants at the seam of my crotch. Holy fucking shit! My panties are next, and be...
During my last year of college I wrote the same ten pages over and over again. Those ten pages became the first few pages of my first novel. I can still recite the opening paragraph from memory - only now I cringe when I do it because they are - surp...
That's coral!" she cried in astonishment. "We must be down in the deeps of the sea!" Well, wasn't that what you wanted?" said the trout. "I thought you wished you could see the sea!" I did," said Jane, looking very surprised. "But I never expected th...
So Lorenzo grew up in Chile without arms, an unfortunate situation for any child, but he also grew up in Pinochet’s Chile, which turned unfortunate situations into desperate ones, on top of which he soon discovered that he was homosexual, which mad...
I am not expecting anyone to feel sorry for me, but when friends ask how it feels to be a debut novelist who has also been long listed for the Man Booker prize, I have to admit that my response has confused me. I am so overwhelmed, so delighted, so h...
The universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. There is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. ...
Its funny whenever people who have'nt seen me in years meet up with me again and they are surprised that I'm not as shy and quiet as I was in the past, I credit that to my years of drinking at bars and partys and conversing with people I would never ...
I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going ...
The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it’s about and why you’re doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and y...
Green heard her voice, murmuring, and Adrian’s, murmuring back. Something inside of him made an actual glass-cracking noise—and before he could convince himself that that it was his imagination, Blissa and three of the other nymphs danced through...
Song after Battle: As the young men went by I was looking for him. It surprises me anew That he has gone. It is something To which I cannot be reconciled. Owls hoot at me. Owls hoot at me. That is what I hear In my life. Wolves howl at me. Wolves how...
We are so little reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it. “How he’s grown!” we exclaim, “How time flies!” as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty. It is as strange as if a fish were repeate...
When we find ourselves in a situation in which our buttons are being pushed, we can choose to repress or act out, or we can choose to practice. If we can start to do the exchange, breathing in with the intention of keeping our hearts open to the emba...
Its always hard to find out that a person you once considered a great friend has completely turned their back on you. Life is full of surprises, some good and some bad. From my experience, bumping into bad ones never gets easier, but you learn to exp...
The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating...
The lesson here is that high expectations can be counter-productive. We probably can do more to affect the quality of our lives by controlling our expectations than we can by doing virtually anything else. The blessing of modest expectations is that ...
I used to have costumed characters come out, like SpongeBob. It's just fun to make it into this minor event, just to surprise people and experiment and be weird and just have fun with it. I've done just the hour stand-up, and that's fun, but the othe...
Yeah, and so Max and Dylan are supposed to, like, go to Germany and have kids together," I heard Gazzy say. My eyes popped open and I bolted upright. "What?" Fang said, his voice icy. "Gazzy!" I yelled. Wide blue eyes looked at me in surprise, then b...
That the sum of a man's life was not where he wound up but in the details that brought him there. That we made mistakes. I closed my eyes, sick of the riddles, and to my surprise all I could see were dandelions-as if they had been painted on the fiel...
…and yet, at the end of it all, a few very broad lines did seem to stick out, like the primary colors in a painting that explain all the confusing blends. And once I had understood my artificial convention, as one understands a convention of the th...
I look in the mirror expecting to be 34 and see someone who is 58. What's that all about? I haven't even thought about turning 60 yet, but so many of my friends have celebrated it by now that it's lost its terror. And I don't mind being 58; it's just...
