Self-inflicted pain has a calming effect; it clears the head, diminishes one's fascination with the ego, and most important, gives one the sense of having taken some real action against the everyday foolishness of the body and of the vagrant, willful...
What killed people wasn't a bullet, a blade, a fist to the face. What killed people was a feeling. Left too long. Sometimes in the cold, frozen. Sometimes buried and fetid. And sometimes on the shores of a lake, isolated. Left to grow old, and odd.
Living in China has made me appreciate my own country, with its tiny, ethnically diverse population of unassuming donut-eaters.
Sex is not about reproduc-tion, gender is not about males and females, courtship is not aboutpersuasion, fashion is not about beauty, and love is not about affec-tion. Below the surface of every banality and cliche there lies irony,cynicism, and prof...
Can we all pause a moment to appreciate the artistry of that sentence? "Sitting casually on the floor, a guard sat..." That's freaking art right there! Someone nominate this thing for the Hugo Award already!
This is what I feared would come; this is what I have dreaded. It is not very bright and honorable as you have always thought it; it is not like a ballad. It is a muddle and a mess, and a sinful waste, and good men have died and more will follow.
Be a wife of whom he can make no complaint, Margaret. That is the best advice I can give to you. You will be his wife; that is to be his servant, his possession. He will be your master. You had better please him.
A parcel--taken from one place to another, handed from one owner to another, unwrapped and bundled up at will--is all that I am. A vessel, for the bearing of sons, for one nobleman or another: it hardly matters who.
The baby should always be saved in preference to the mother. That is the advice of the Holy Church, you know that. I was only reminding women of their duty. There is no need to make everything so personal, Margaret. You make everything into your own ...
All this is always for nothing," he says. "Don't you understand that yet? Every death is a pointless death; every battle should have been avoided. But if Edward can defeat the queen, and imprison her along with her husband, then it will indeed be ove...
Upon the one thing every writer absolutely must have, and that is intellectual curiosity.
Sunrise is the time to feel that you will be able to find out how to help somebody close to you who you think needs help even if he doesn't think. At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear
Sunrise is the time to feel that you will be able to find out how to help somebody close to you who you think needs help even if he doesn't think so. At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear
They sang the words in unison, yet somehow created a web of sounds with their voices. It was like hearing a piece of fabric woven with all the colors of a rainbow. I did not know that such beauty could be formed by the human mouth. I had never heard ...
Only fools insist upon life at any cost.... Others would say that life may be laid down when it becomes too heavy. Where does it go, after all, but into the keeping of the Powers who gave it and will give it once again?
There is your car and the open road, the fabled lure of random adventure. You stand at the verge, and you could become anything. Your future shifts and warps with your smallest step, your shitty little whims. The man you will become is at your mercy.
Here is the door of my mom's house, well-remembered childhood portal. Here is the yard, and a set of wires that runs from the house to a wooden pole, and some fat birds sitting together on the wires, five of them lined up like beads on an abacus.
Think about it. For the sake of fame, men will risk great dangers. They put themselves in the jaws of death more than for their children. For fame, they will spend their money like water and work their fingers to the bone. Have you not observed this ...
And while a bald head and a looped ribbon were seen as badges of courage and hope, her reluctant vocabulary and vanishing memories advertised mental instability and impending insanity. Those with cancer could expect to be supported by their community...
He did not smile. 'We are the keepers of the world's greatest treasures. Does that mean nothing to you?' "My children are my greatest treasures,' she said. 'Stone no matter how old, means nothing to me when compared to their welfare.
It was the soul of the machine, the ethological epicentre, the planetary ground zero of their commercial energy. I could almost feel it, shivering down like bomb-blasted rivers of glass from these undreaming towers of dark and light invading the snow...
