I often laughed, and you often gave me a dissatisfied look, till you pressed me to unfold my past before you as if it were a roll of pictures. It was then I felt respect for you. Because you unreservedly showed me your resolution to catch something a...
You, God, who live next door-- If at times, through the long night, I trouble you with my urgent knocking-- this is why: I hear you breathe so seldom. I know you're all alone in that room. If you should be thirsty, there's no one to get you a glass o...
The beliefs and behaviour of the Restoration reflect the theories of society put forward by Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan, which was written in exile in Paris and published in 1651. Like many texts of the time, The Leviathan is an allegory. It recal...
The swing of his nature took him from extreme languor to devouring energy; and as I knew well, he was never so truly formidable as when, for days on end, he had been lounging in his armchair amid his improvisations and his black-letter editions. Then...
I believe we must do things in our lives for the right reasons, because we enjoy doing them, with no expectation of getting something back in return. Otherwise, we are constantly being disappointed." She moved her turquoise bracelet back and forth on...
But love is always new. Regardless of whether we love once, twice, or a dozen times in our life, we always face a brand-new situation. Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere. We simply have to accept it, because ...
A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is ...
…is methodical abuse, often using indoctrination, aimed at breaking the will of another human being. In a 1989 report, the Ritual Abuse Task Force of the L.A. County Commission for Women defined ritual abuse as: “Ritual Abuse usually involves rep...
How one views Scripture will determine the rest of one's theology. There is no more basic issue: Every system of thought that takes seriously the claims of the Bible to be the inspired, authoritative Word of God will share a commitment to particular ...
They arrived home again to a most peculiar sight. The small garden at the front of the Banana House had been transformed. A tidal wave of cushions, beanbags, quilts, hearth rugs, and sleeping bags appeared to have swept up the lawn and broken at the ...
She once told me of a night that fumed with escapes and was filled with bedsides reeking of ecstasy; she told me the stars cast not judgments, but blessings, knowing full well the disastrous outcomes of the deeds they cradled with the strings of thei...
She hit the button again, holding her breath this time until she heard it. Soft, sibilant, as insubstantial as the breaths that came before: Shannon. The voice whispered Shannon. The blood rushed out of her head. Her heart knocked hard in her chest. ...
Pain, too, comes from depths that cannot be revealed. We do not know whether those depths are in ourselves or elsewhere, in a graveyard, in a scarcely dug grave, only recently inhabited by withered flesh. This truth, which is banal enough, unravels t...
Why shouldn’t I? I demand silently. Why shouldn’t I become a famous writer? Like Norman Mailer. Or Philip Roth. And F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemmingway and all those other men. Why can’t I be like them? I mean, what is the point of becoming a wr...
I mean, I don't know much about the Civil War, but whenever I think of that time—I mean, ever since I've had these fantasies about those generals, those gorgeous young Southern generals with their tawny mustaches and beards, and hair in ringlets, o...
In those years before mobile phones, email and Skype, travelers depended on the rudimentary communications system known as the postcard. Other methods--the long-distance phone call, the telegram--were marked "For Emergency Use Only." So my parents wa...
Then a movement began among the people. They creaked to their feet, shuffled and fumbled up to the front, kneeling on the floor, and she saw little Thomas at the beginning of the row. The priest turned and made the sign of the cross and all signed th...
The first phase of modernism, which so far as the English language goes we associate with Pound and Yeats, Wyndham Lewis and Eliot and Joyce, was clerkly enough, sceptical in many ways; and yet we can without difficulty convict most of these authors ...
One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts—just mere thoughts—are as powerful as electric batteries—as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison. To let a sad thought or a bad one get int...
If I were you," he said with a wink and a smile as his eyes swept over those who's started the discussion, "I would waste far less time ragging on religion and find out just how much Jesus wants to be your friend without any strings attached. He will...
My life will be what I make it," he told her. "That is true for all of us all the time. We cannot know what the future will bring or how the events of the future will make us feel. We cannot even plan and feel any certainty that our most carefully co...
