At length the Lady Galadriel released them from her eyes, and she smiled. ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled,’ she said. ‘Tonight you shall sleep in peace.’ Then they sighed and felt suddenly weary, as those who have been questioned long and...
I tried to avoid Mimi. Her presence seemed to call forth every rejection I'd ever experienced--the teachers who'd looked at me as though I held no promise, the boys who didn't like me back. Around her, I became fourteen again.
Isi, I’m trying to say that you’ve been… no, you’re so, you’re–” He stopped. "You are,” he said. His hand found hers, and he held her finger tightly, as though he did not dare to do any more than hold her one hand, and look at her, an...
Soul mates. They really call themselves that, which makes sense, because I guess they are ... They have no harsh edges with each other, no spiny conflicts, they ride though life like conjoined jellyfish - expanding and contracting instinctively, fill...
For a moment the rank felt as though they had just returned from single-handedly conquering a distant province. They felt, in fact, tremendously bucked-up, which was how Lady Ramkin would almost certainly have put it and which was definitely several ...
Yet though Americans have been driving up to their houses for decades and entering through backdoors, side doors, kitchen doors, and especially doors through garages, architects keep designing houses with ceremonial front doors that are nowhere near ...
I've shepherded a good many people through their lives, I've baptized babies by the hundred, and all that time I have felt as though a great part of life was closed to me. Your mother says I was like Abraham. But I had no old wife and no promise of a...
How lonely I was, even when I was with him. How it felt, him not making love to me, being affectionate, making me feel desired or desirable. How much it bothered me that, even though I'd talked to him about all of this, even wrote him other e-mails, ...
The law was good, Paul wrote, and its purpose vital. But its purpose was also temporary. Once Christ fulfilled the law, his followers would have trivialized his sacrifice by living as though they were still subject to the law's constraints.
Cosmé is in constant attendance. Though no one will take Aneaxi’s place, Cosmé is the most efficient maid I’ve ever had. I tell her so, frequently, and it gives me such a twist of pleasure to watch her react to praise from someone she despises....
You see how I live: shadows and silence, leaving things as I find them because I have no reason to disturb them. But there are things that I have known, even though I never wished to know them and cannot give them a name.
Anger at happenstance for its absurd timing. Anger at myself for being so angry. I hate being angry and every time I got this angry it made me more angry at the fact that I was so angry. I realized though that I couldn't really be mad at any of those...
He [Ranger] peeled my [Stephanie] clothes off and wrangled me into bed. And then suddenly he was inside me. He once told me that time spent with him would ruin me for all other men. When he said it, I thought it was an outrageous threat. I no longer ...
They, like me, like all of us, had, once upon a time, in a past so far away it seemed like heaven, caught by chance a glimpse of an inner essence, only to forget what it was. It was this lost memory that pained us, reduced us to ruins, though still w...
He wants to see, he wants to know, only to see and know. I'm aware that it is this mentality, this curiosity, which is responsible for the hydrogen bomb and the imminent demise of civilization and that we would all be better off if we were still at t...
The aftermath of bearing shackles is an exquisite devastation, fraught with the ravages of survival. Even though one is no longer held captive—be that from a person, a government, or one’s inner self—the scars are deeply engraved into one’s p...
Though these young men unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to mult...
It was difficult to see the exact nature of his expression as, in addition to the ubiquitous mustache, the clockmaker also wore a golden-brown beard of such epic proportions as might dwarf a mulberry bush. It was as though his mustache had become ove...
The honor a man carries in his heart cannot be explained, lass," he said slowly. "Nor can you measure the courage of a man who will not betray his friends, even though he faces disaster himself. We've no right to question, unless we have known the sa...
This is what I have. The dull hangover of waiting, the blush of my heart on the damp grass, the flower-faced moon. A gull broods on the shore where a moment ago there were two. Softly my right hand fondles my left hand as though it were you.
Have you ever been to Paris before?" I asked Kylian. "No, though from what I've seen, I'm sure it's worth a trip. And even with what little I saw I think it's quite fitting for you to be the Patroness of Paris. You're like Paris and Paris is like you...