Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some meaning seems distinct almost within reach, but is elusive; it refuses to condense into definite form; the attach...
It is true that the virtues which are less esteemed and practiced now--independence, self-reliance, and the willingness to bear risks, the readiness to back one's own conviction against a majority, and the willingness to voluntary cooperation with on...
Any way I slice reality it comes out poorly, and I feel an urge to not exist, something I have never felt before; and now here it comes with conviction, almost panic. I mentally bless and exonerate anyone who has kicked a chair out from beneath her o...
Everyone knew what he was thinking. Certainly there were demons in the world. But they were like Tehlu’s angels. They were like heroes and kings. They belonged in stories. They belonged out there. Taborlin the Great called up fire and lightning to ...
Losses do that. One life-loss can infect the whole of a life. Like a rash that wears through our days, our sight becomes peppered with black voids. Now everywhere we look, we only see all that isn’t: holes, lack, deficiency.
If the mystery can be reduced to one solution, it lies in a simple coincidence: Rimbaud's interest in his own work had survived the realization that the world would not be changed by verbal innovation. It did not survive the failure of all his adult ...
Sleeping is terrifying. When you close your eyes and surrender your consciousness to the void, you lose yourself—voluntarily—and you're trustingly assuming you'll find yourself back out of the labyrinth again. Usually you do. But sometimes you do...
Without knowing why or how, I found myself in love with this strange Wanderess. Maybe I was just in love with the dream she was selling me: a life of destiny and fate; as my own life up until we met had been so void of enchantment. Those things: myst...
Had she believed all that? Old Pilar's folklore? No, not really; or not exactly. Most likely Pilar hadn't quite believed it either, but it was a reassuring story: that the dead were not entirely dead but were alive in a different way; a paler way adm...
The narcissist, cut off from her spirituality, is one who spends unquantifiable energy supporting and maintaining and utterly and completely fake self, in denial of one's true self, trading it for glamour to compensate for a core of being that is sim...
Fantasy imposes order on the universe. Or, at least, it superimposes order on the universe. And it is a human order. Reality tells us that we exist for a brief, beleaguered span in a cold infinity; fantasy tells us that the figures in the foreground ...
The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than A Shore Thing, by Snooki. And it may be; Snooki definit...
When the sun goes down, melting away his caresses into the sky which consonants with the ocean, lively colors are scattered through the deep pale depth during some short sensuous instants. Later, as by art of magic, light is consumed into the infinit...
The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters—ther...
In that second, I think about running through that door and going with him. But I know that it’s not the road I’m meant for. Because we’re both still incapable of love. We’re both not ready yet. And I know that I’ll miss him. And some night...
Why is it that people talk about death, as if it is a part of life, when it is entirely separate? Someone passes on into the never ending void, where the living aren't allowed. We can't see, hear, touch or feel those who have succumbed to the eternal...
I'm not talking about the blood ecstasy. I'm talking about my being able to fill that emotion void she has. You know her as well as I do, maybe better. She aches with it. She needs to be accepted for who she is so badly. And I was able to do that. Do...
There is nothing else in magic but the wild thought of the bird as it casts itself into the void. There is no creature upon the earth with such potential for magic. Even the least of them may fly straight out of this world and come by chance to the O...
Space, as you can see, is a complete void, nothing but clear air, without solid objects or the illumination of light. On some of our photographs of space, however, studied close to, even without a magnifying glass or an enlargement lens, you will not...
Poetry can be more eloquent than the most eloquent sermons, and it becomes a weapon more formidable than the sharpest of swords; whenever such a poem--which finds its correct tune and conveys the excitement of the heart--rings out, all the miserable,...
I endured all our hardships as if they had been luxuries: I made light of scurvy, banqueted off train-oil, and met that cold for which there is no language framed, and which might be a new element; or which, rather, had seemed in that long night like...