I sighed. "Now what do I do?" He leaned against my wall. "What do you want to do?" "Since when has that mattered?" "It's always mattered. It doesn't mean you'll get what you want, but what you want always matters. That's what defines you.
I must apologize for calling so late," said he, "and I must further beg you to be so unconventional as to allow me to leave your house presently by scrambling over your back garden wall.
If we were to gain God's perspective, even for a moment, and were to look at the way we go through life accumulating and hoarding and displaying our things, we would have the same feelings of horror and pity that any sane person has when he views peo...
The state of interbeing is a vulnerable state. It is the vulnerability of the naive altruist, of the trusting lover, of the unguarded sharer. To enter it, one must leave behind the seeming shelter of a control-based life, protected by walls of cynici...
A heart pulsating in harmony with the circulation of sap and the flow of rivers? A body with the rhythms of the earth in its movements? No. Instead: a mind, shut off from the oxygen of alert senses, that has wasted itself on 'treasons, stratagems and...
There were books everywhere. Hundreds of books. Thousands of books. There were books of every size, shape, and color. They lined the walls from floor to ceiling, standing straight and rigid as soldiers on the polished mahogany shelves, the gilt lette...
Curran let our a ragged snarl and punched the other wall. It burst and the entire wreck of the house came down in a fountain of dust. He shook his hand, his knuckles bloody. "Bricks are hard," I told him patiently, as if to a child. "Don't hit bricks...
Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push ba...
Don't give up. I know you've made a thousand attempts to reach your goal, but look at it this way: after repeatedly banging your head against the wall, you ought to be numb enough break through this time.
Unable to see, they were briefly seized by the characteristic Prague anxiety of never finding the entrance--of arriving at one's goal but remaining blocked from it by a wall or a stone on account of having overlooked an alley or medieval door a few d...
The thought went through my mind that we should film ourselves in our sexual act, and project our frenzied copulation permanently onto the walls of the tea-room, as a lesson to wake up the boring people who drank tea here, and to show them what life ...
This exists. It can be seen. It can be touched. These in pace, these dungeons, these iron hinges, these necklets, that lofty peep-hole on a level with the river's current, that box of stone closed with a lid of granite like a tomb, with this differen...
Shrinking in a corner, pressed into the wall; do they know I'm present, am I here at all? Is there a written rule book, that tells you how to be— all the right things to talk about— that everyone has but me? Slowly I am withering— a flowered de...
Just beyond the ticket booth Father had painted on a wall in bright red letters the question: DO YOU KNOW WHICH IS THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL IN THE ZOO? An arrow pointed to a small curtain. There were so many eager, curious hands that pulled at the c...
Is it not possible — I often wonder — that things we have felt with great intensity have an experience independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible,in time, that some device will be invented by whic...
As the message drained away Vimes stared at the opposite wall, in which the door now opened, after a cursory knock, to reveal the steward bearing that which is guaranteed to frighten away all nightmares, to wit, a cup of hot tea.* * The sound of the ...
After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps,...
You see the mistakes of one system—the surveillance—and the mistakes of the other—the inequality—but there’s nothing you could have done in the one and nothing you can do now about the other. She laughs wryly. “And the clearer you see tha...
If you close your eyes when you sing in Latin, and if you stand right at the back so you can keep one hand against the cold stone wall of the church, you can pretend you're in the Middle Ages. That's why I did it. That's what I was in it for.
turns me on so loud it's like no sound, everybody yelling at me hands over their ears from behind a glass wall, faces working around in talk circles but no sound from the mouths. my sound soaks up all other sound.
There's a power that comes with silence. I had grown to fear the unsaid thing. So it felt like a release to say it-to admit that the risk wasn't just inside our walls-it was inside my skin. I was willing to claw, scratch, and bleed until I'd found it...
