Why were you running?” Gordon looked confused. “I wasn’t going to hurt you.” Bite me,” I told him. He was so going to get charged with assault. I might even have to put a restraining order on his sorry ass. “Oh, wait a minute, you already...
The past is a curious thing. It’s with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it’s got no reality, it’s just a set of facts that you’ve ...
You should never be afraid to give yourself a chance to be everything you are capable of being. If you think you’re not good enough, you’ll surprise yourself if you keep trying. No one can ever tell you you’re doing it wrong. Everyone has their...
Desperation is a great giver of clarity: Bartimaeus needed no time to decide what to do next. “Jesus! Son of David!” he shouted. “Have mercy on me!” (Mark 10:47). The crowd turned to him in disgust. “Shut your mouth, son of filth!” But Ba...
when you asked me to stay away from you in your note, it finally hit me. You meant it. You weren’t going to try anymore. I’d run out of chances, and I realized that the night before would be the last time I ever saw you. And I couldn’t … The ...
It is...difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows. [E]very memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in t...
And now at the airport, after shaking hands with everybody, waving good-bye, I think about all the different ways we leave people in this world. Cheerily waving good-bye to some at airports, knowing we'll never see each other again. Leaving others on...
There is nothing else in magic but the wild thought of the bird as it casts itself into the void. There is no creature upon the earth with such potential for magic. Even the least of them may fly straight out of this world and come by chance to the O...
Julia had no trouble believing that, but she suspected his challenging demeanor was his way of keeping people at a distance. Sadly it was a strategy she understood all too well.Trusting by nature, she'd learned the hard way that when you let someone ...
What are the years from twenty to forty? Fettered and bound by personal and emotional relationships. That's bound to be. That's living. But later there's a new stage. You can think, observe life, discover something about other people and the truth ab...
She wished she had cancer instead. She'd trade Alzheimer's for cancer in a heartbeat. She felt ashamed for wishing this, and it was certainly a pointless bargaining, but she permitted herself the fantasy anyway. With cancer, she'd have something to f...
Because...Beacause it's so good, and there's only one chance to read a book for the first time, and I want it to last. That experience. I'd finish it in a day otherwise, and that'd be like...like eating a carton of ice cream in one sitting. Too much ...
One more month," he said finally. "And then they—and Samuel, too—will just have to get used to it. His eye is the color of a bitch with dark chocolate, worst few years and he leaned forward. "And you will marry me." I smiled, showing my teeth. "D...
You told me once of the plants that lie dormant through the drought, that wait, half-dead, deep in the earth. The plants that wait for the rain. You said they'd wait for years, if they had to; that they'd almost kill themselves before they grew again...
The thing I want you especially to understand is this feeling of divine revelation. I feel that this structure was "out there" all along I just couldn't see it. And now I can! This is really what keeps me in the math game-- the chance that I might gl...
Morality is for everybody, and this means that the views of more than one person are needed to create it. That was what made the modern morality, with its emphasis on individuals and the working out of an individual position, so weak. If you gave peo...
Do you know, Mother, that Haj Salem was buried alive in his home? Does he tell you stories in heaven now? I wish I had had a chance to meet him. To see his toothless grin and touch his leathery skin. To beg him, as you did in your youth, for a story ...
On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betra...
There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he...
I really am the world's shittiest boyfriend. Holding onto something for the sake of having it, for nothing other than to keep what is familiar and safe close to me because the alternative is so fucking terrifying I can't begin to wrap my head around ...
