I read a lot. I always have, but in those two years I gorged myself on books with a voluptuous, almost erotic gluttony. I would go to the local library and take out as many as I could, and then lock myself in the bedsit and read solidly for a week. I...
When she thinks of the toxins built up inside of her from so many years of eating carelessly, of the resentment that has grown steadily over fifteen years of marriage, of the stretch marks and the varicose veins that came from two pregnancies, only o...
None of the characters in (the story) were distinguished ones -- not even the lion. He was an old lion, prepared from birth to lose his life rather than to leave it. But he had the dignity of all free creatures, and so he was allowed his moment. It w...
Incidentally her head ached and her shoulders ached and her lungs ached and the ankle-bones of both feet ached quite excruciatingly. But nothing of her felt permanently incapacitated except her noble expression. Like a strip of lip-colored lead suspe...
The thing about lying is it’s like creating your own world, controlling your own little world. A tiny innocent, or as some people call them white lie, can lead eventually to the break-up of a relationship. If the other person in the relationship kn...
At the advent of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the human heart: one very reasonably invites a man to consider the nature of the peril and the means of escaping it; the other, with a still greater show of reason, ar...
He stepped forward and took the butterfly hanging around my neck between his two fingers: “This will remind me, both of my mistake and how much I care for you.” He took another step closer so we were only inches apart, and his hand moved to the b...
A better man wouldn’t play this ‘sweethearts’ game with her when he knew very well it couldn’t lead to more. But he wasn’t a better man. He was Colin Sandhurst, reckless, incorrigible rogue—and damn it, he couldn’t resist. He wanted to ...
It wasn't a perfect body but it was the body she deserved. Not just from every bar of chocolate or bag of crisps or laden plate of food that she'd eaten. This body was also testament to all the hours in the gym and cycling up hills on her bike and gl...
Here are the Top Ten things that your parents say to you: -Is that all you're going to do all day, sit in front of the computer? -When I was your age I had two jobs. -Why don't you wear some clothes that fir for a change? -Turn it down. I can hear it...
He knew how hot those rumbly-grumbly, gravel-voiced noises made her: hotter than two rats wrestling in a wool sock…only not as scratchy. Or as smelly. Probably less squeaky, too. But she had to be strong. For the sake of her children. For the sake ...
Some people appear to be happy, but they simply don't give the matter much thought. Others make plans: I'm going to have a husband, a home, two children, a house in the country. As long as they're busy doing that, they're like bulls looking for the b...
...most people in the ancient world, did not make a sharp distinction between myth and reality. The two were intimately tied together in their spiritual experience. That is to say, they were less interested in what , than in what it . It would have b...
But once upon a time - that would be our time - a telephone cord seemed like nothing less than a lifeline. It was your attachment to the outside world and, even more than that, your attachment to the people you loved, or wanted to love, or tried to l...
Stupid arbitrary shit means it will take a movie star to die and a hemophiliac teenager to die before ordinary people start to mobilize, start to feel that the disease needs to be stopped. Tens of thousands of people will die before drugs are made an...
Max is a marvel to us. He will never have to come out because he will never have been kept in. Even though he has a mom and a dad, they made sure from the beginning to tell him that it didn't have to be a mom and a dad. It could be a mom and a mom, a...
A faerie heart is different from a human heart. Human hearts are elastic. They have room for all sorts of passions, and they can break and heal and love again and again. Faerie hearts are evolutionarily less sophisticated. They are small and hard, li...
The nuns taught us there are two ways through life, the way of Nature and the way of Grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow. Grace doesn't try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. Nat...
I had a dream about you. I was trying to dissect love like it was a frog, and you were trying to dissect a frog like it was love. I said we should team up and have sex, and you said, “Sure, I’ll have sex with you—for twenty bucks.” Geez! For ...
A library cannot be made all at once, any more than a house or a nation or a tree; they must all take time to grow, and so must a library. I wouldn't even know what books to go and ask for. I dare say, if I were to try, I couldn't at a moment's notic...
It is an unfortunate fact that proofs can be very misleading. Proofs exist to establish once and for all, according to very high standards, that certain mathematical statements are irrefutable facts. What is unfortunate about this is that a proof, in...
