I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his cele...
To be the child of a conficted or reputed witch was inherently dangerous; in one pathetic case in Lorraine a young couple were both accused, and it emerged that they had decided to marry after attending an execution at the stake of their respective p...
[He] believed both love and hate to be irrelevant. To him, they were "impediments of the human condition," and, in his words again, "imagine what could be accomplished if the human race would only shed its humanity.
They were mostly French, a few Arabs, and despite their uniforms they didn't look very important any more. Later I learned that if you watch men die, especially if you've known them at all, they still look important afterward no matter what you have ...
I had a dream about you. You were a statue made of bronze, and I was in love with you. I tried to be patient, but I wanted more action than you could give me, so eventually I fell in love with a water fountain.
I had a dream about you. Too many people died that day for us to talk about love. But through the stench of rotting corpses, all I could think about was how beautiful you were and how much I wanted to avoid prison.
I had a dream about you, You were peeing behind a house and when I approached you, you smiled and said to me "Your face makes me happy" I was so flattered by your words and impressed that you could pee and still talk to me. ...
I had a dream about you. I invented and sold shoes that left no footprints, and you were thinking about committing a murder in a muddy area. I said that committing a murder was a bad idea, and that you should commit several murders, but I was just tr...
I had a dream about you. The leaves changed from yellow to red, but the stoplights did not. This made me continually cautious, and you kept honking at me. I thought you were the rudest goose ever, so I ran you over. Then the light turned red.
I wanted something that I could look back on and say, yes, you were fighting too, you burned to be alive, and whatever failure or accident of nature caused you to be killed could be explained by something other than the fact that I'd missed your givi...
I finally accept that not only do I not understand the death of my relationship, but I do not need to. These men were good and kind to me, they loved me and I loved them back and the shock at the finish holds no wisdom. The revelation is not that I l...
The things that brought me the most comfort now were too small to list. Raspberries in cream. Sparrows with cocked heads. Shadows of bare limbs making for sidewalk filigrees. Roses past their prime with their petals loose about them. The shouts of ch...
we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will on...
If I were a paper pusher for a living, I’d be pissed if my coworkers moved my desk into the wind tunnel. So to repay them, I’d probably relocate all the urinals to inside the wind tunnel. That would teach those guys to never move my desk from the...
There is no perfectly shaped part of the motorcycle and never will be, but when you come as close as these instruments take you, remarkable things happen, and you go flying across the countryside under a power that would be called magic if it were no...
We fought in 1974 - that was a long time ago. After 1981, we became the best of friends. By 1984, we loved each other. I am not closer to anyone else in this life than I am to Muhammad Ali. Why? We were forged by that first fight in Zaire, and our li...
My best friend growing up really put the bug in my ear about acting. We created this one hour-and-a-half improv play when we were 10 or 11 and performed it at the library. We just played off each other so well and had the best time doing it and the f...
Words were weapons, his father had taught him that, and he'd wanted to hurt Clary more than he'd ever wanted to hurt any girl. In fact, he wasn't sure he had ever wanted to hurt a girl before. Usually he just wanted them, and then he wanted them to l...
I had a dream about you. Your skin was sandpaper and your armpits were hollow, filled with dark chocolate and prunes. You offered me coffee and when I said no you handed me black coffee with a note that read "12 reasons not to drink coffee". I knew w...
Sometimes, though, you make a pact with yourself. I'll pretend there's nothing wrong if you pretend there's nothing wrong. It's called denial, and it's one of the strongest pacts in the world. Just ask all those people who were still drinking champag...
I had a dream about you. It happened during the day. You used a pencil to erase the ink I wrote over the chalkboard since the professor told me 7 + 4 didn't equal 10. You were really cool about it; in fact, you handed me a bucket of ice. Apparently I...
