Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; ...
Adrian smiled and clasped my hands, taking a few steps toward me. "And as for who you are, you’re the same beautiful, brave, and ridiculously smart caffeinated fighter you’ve been since the day I met you.” Finally, he put “beautiful” at the...
The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence the janitor w...
In a funny way, Dad was always a bow-tie wearer, always a little more traditional than you might imagine. Because even though he had blue hair and tattoos and wore leather jackets and worked in a record store, he wanted to marry Mom back at a time wh...
Broad-Based Education: Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.… I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.… It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that sci...
The past week, Mother had denied her a pass to the market for some minor, forgettable reason, and she’d taken it hard. Her market excursions were the acme of her days, and trying to commiserate, I'd said, “I'm sorry, Handful, I know how you must ...
... Melissa. Where are you planning to go?" His voice was nasally, shit, he knew I had no idea where to go. "Well if you didn't change the apartment I was staying in I would. I was going to stay in a hotel" "How will you do that without your purse, s...
I understood that the most terrible thing in life is complete hopelessness... To cross out all the 'maybes' and give up the fight when you still have strength for it is the most terrible form of suicide. It's almost unbearable to watch it happening i...
Anyhow, whether undergraduate or shop boy, man or woman, it must come as a shock about the age of twenty—the world of the elderly—thrown up in such black outline upon what we are; upon the reality; the moors and Byron; the sea and the lighthouse;...
No, Sarah. There's more. There's always more. I won't give you up. I won't! It's not just a game. Midgard is real for many people and it's real for what they've experienced. It's real. We don't doubt the way they feel or what they've seen or how they...
In third period Math, we were forced to sit in alphabetical order. Which put me right behind Logan, who was throwing all those passes to Aiden in the scrimmage. He took off his navy blazer and when he leaned forward to write, I could see muscles bulg...
The world citizen is a small leaf on the giant tree of life. They do not see a difference between the branch they were born on and the remaining branches on the tree, because they understand well that we are are all connected to the same roots. The w...
For the man in the street, the philosophies of opposites, particularly Good and Evil, have served as a torture chamber, a crucifix made from metaphor. Thrust into a world which views him as the property of Gods and States and overwhelmed by an unrepa...
Wizards don't believe in gods in the same way that most people don't find it necessary to believe in, say, tables. They know they're there, they know they're there for a purpose, they'd probably agree that they have a place in a well-organised univer...
Hell, yes. I love you; that’s not going to change. I want this, I want you, and I think . . . Oh hell, here comes the Dawson’s Creek.” He grimaced and I chuckled in spite of the moment. His gaze grew wistful, and he looked so young. “I don’...
Because I am not yet living up to what Jesus expects me to be in those red letters in the Bible, I always define myself as somebody who is saved by God's grace and is on his way to becoming a Christian. (...) Being saved is trusting in what Christ di...
There, in the unconscious, we sleep upon the psyche's oceanic floor, together like some vast bed of kelp, each wavering strand an individual American, swaying in the currents of national suggestion. In the form of a giant Portuguese man-of-war, our g...
The voice welling up out of this little man is terrific, Harry had noticed it at the house, but here, in the nearly empty church, echoing off the walnut knobs and memorial plaques and high arched rafters, beneath the tall central window of Jesus taki...
The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in ones own home." Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questi...
There are many things worth telling that are not quite narrative. And eternity itself possesses no beginning, middle or end. Fossils, arrowheads, castle ruins, empty crosses: from the Parthenon to the Bo Tree to a grown man's or woman's old stuffed b...
But love is much like a dam: if you allow a tiny crack to form through which only a trickle of water can pass, that trickle will quickly bring down the whole structure, and soon no one will be able to control the force of the current. For when those ...
