Perhaps eggs are like neurons, which also are not replenished in adulthood: they know too much. Eggs must plan the party. Sperm need only to show up- wearing top hat and tails, of course.
This was all of it, no doubt, the strange passing feeling that had come to me in the boat. Age. Vanity. The impossibility of accepting the new versions of oneself that life kept offering. The impossibility of the old version’s vanishing.
But democrats are seldom welcome on planets run by totalitarian governments, and scarcely more welcome on planets where anarchy prevails--this is due to the very nature of democracy, the only practical compromise between totalitarianism and anarchy.
Outside the drizzling rain had begun again. It pattered around the house, and on the roofs and eaves, like a million, tiny, stealthy feet: softly, as though the night were teeming with a host of minute, dark beings.
We'd been assured it wouldn't be painful, though she might experience 'discomfort,' a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn't yours.
I'll remember you, he thinks, and as the gun carriage, with its coffin and its dented helmet pass him by, he closes his eyes. Nothing will bring them back. Not the words of comfortable men. Not the words of politicians. Or the platitudes of paid poet...
You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.
...trying to be a good mother may be as distant from being a good mother as trying to have a good time is from truly having one.
Although the infertile are entitled to sour grapes, it's against the rules, isn't it, to actually have a baby and spend any time at all on that banished parallel life in which you didn't.
But I was beginning to intuit that full-blown maturity was not so very different from childhood. Both states in their extreme were all about following the rules.
I remain exquisitely still. Anytime the eagle of another heart soars, whatever you are-mouse, toad, snake- don't move. From such great heights, it might not see you.
I know already that I can survive it. That's the sorrow of it all. That whatever comes I'll survive it. I mean, even if the worst were to be true, would it really be the worst?
I had to cease to mourn what could never be and make the most of what was possible. And I would begin doing that by trying to mend the hurts of the past.
Once, somebody asked Robert Schumann to explain the meaning of a certain piece of music he had just played on the piano. What Robert Schumann did was sit back down at the piano and play the piece of music again.
What matters isn't how well you play when you're playing well. What mattersis how well you play when you're playing badly.' - Martina Navratilova
There is a primal reassurance in being touched, in knowing that someone else, someone close to you, wants to be touching you. There is a bone-deep security that goes with the brush of a human hand, a silent, reflex-level affirmation that someone is n...
The wacky thing about those bad guys is that you can't count on them to be obvious. They forget to wax their mustaches and goatees, leave their horns at home, send their black hats to the dry cleaner's. They're funny like that.
An "attack on SeaWorld" might mean a bomb, or it might mean graffiti and glitter and a cream pie in the face. The government doesn't always seem to distinguish between the two.
Language does this to our memories— simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft -told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.
So many problems, however infinitely varied they first appear, turn out to be matters of money. I can't tell you how much this offends me.
I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied. (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, p. 99)
