We are so limited, you have to use the same word for loving Rosaleen as you do for loving Coke with peanuts. Isn't that a shame we don't have many more ways to say it?
Clara Winter," he said. "You are a word person and don't ever forget it." He was right. He knew. He could tell. It's something that can be sensed. There's a difference between word-people and non-word-people.
There's been a lot to get used to here." Esther laughed. "Isn't that the truth. I don't know if you ever get used to it really. It just gets in your blood so that you can't stand to be anywhere else.
Owls hoot in B flat, cuckoos in D, but the water ousel sings in the voice of the stream. She builds her nest back of the waterfalls so the water is a lullaby to the little ones. Must be where they learn it.
Are we not witnessing a strange tableau of survival whenever a bird alights on the head of a crocodile, bringing together the evolutionary offspring of Triassic and Jurassic?
The question of what exactly we remember when we listen to old recordings, or whether it can be called remembering at all, becomes less and less answerable over a lifetime.
He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret.
Yes. There is one God, and he lives in the sky, and he hears all of us. It is just that here on earth, we are confused about how to believe in him. But what does it matter, as long as we trust he is there?
I had met death before, in different forms--I knew quite well the pattern of my grieving. First came shock, and then tears, and then a bitter anger, followed by a softer grief that time would wear away.
The early settlers amazed her--they had pluck, they led lives of sweaty drama. Theirs was a world of corsets and whipping posts and indentured servitude. People worked the land and died in ungainly ways. Modern life, in comparison, seemed a cinch.
The Al Saud believe they have an asset more powerful than the ballot box: they have Allah.
She studied my face for a long minute. "Are you going to help my mom?" It was a simple question. But how do you tell a child that things just aren't that simple, that some questions don't have simple answers--or any answer at all?
At one time in my life, a shapeshifted, demonically possessed maniac crashing through a window and trying to rip my face off would have come as an enormous and nasty surprise. But that time was pretty much in the past.
Cats are there to be indulged. That's their function: to receive the love we never fully gave our parents. Not like dogs. Dogs are there to give us the love and devotion our children will never fully give us.
Everyone grieves in different ways. For some, it could take longer or shorter. I do know it never disappears. An ember still smolders inside me. Most days, I don’t notice it, but, out of the blue, it’ll flare to life.
Why can't I remember our family Christmas, or a warm spring day, or anything that might have been pleasant? It is as though the filter of recall is itself altered, so that it blocks out everything but the darkest colors of the spectrum.
The fear of an unknown never resolves, because the unknown expands infinitely outward, leaving you to cling pitifully to any small shelter of the known: a cracker has twelve calories; the skin, when cut, bleeds.
Good morning, God. Another beautiful day. I'm still here, and so is the sun. Thank you. Right, now let's get down to business.
Id me didn't have to be concerned with long-term consequences. He was my instinctive, primitive self, driven by my most primal impulses. I wondered, briefly, if 'id' and 'idiot' came from the same root.
[Janco] paused. His eyes held a distant gleam as if seeing into his past. 'My first practice was a shock. I was a cocky smart aleck--' [Opal] 'Was?' [J] 'Be quiet. I'm telling a story here.
Desire makes life happen. Makes it matter. Makes everything worth it. Desire is life. Hunger to see the next sunrise or sunset, to touch the one you love, to try again. “Hell would be waking up and wanting nothing,” he agrees.