Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of...
Yeah. A feeling. Like the whole point of my life from the alleys in Bangkok to the yachts and private island to coming here like a crazy person trying to fly a helicopter like all of it from birth to here point A to point Z was all some big cosmic tr...
[...] students should be told that an effort is always required, when you start to read a serious author, to overcome mental laziness and reluctance, because you are about to enter the mind of someone who thinks differently from yourself. And that is...
What they don't tell you when you get sober is that if you manage to stay that way, you will bury your friends. Not everyone gets to have a whole new shiny-but-messy life like I have, and I've never come up with a satisfying explanation for why that ...
Emily woke to shadows and their voices. They looked different today, because the entire world hurt. The numbness had worn off sometime between sleep and awake, and she was seeing red. The shadows on the walls were not shadows at all, but red blobs co...
Perhaps if I had made his life more difficult, he would have written less, or less freely. I cannot claim to be the midwife to genius, but if I have not facilitated,I have at least not, as many women might have done, prevented. This is a very small v...
When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean.
Cyril Connolly, twentieth-century writer and critic, wrote that ‘words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.’ That was how I wanted to use books: as an escape back to life. I wanted to engulf myself in books and c...
If one unlabeled bottle holds nonfat milk, what does the second unlabeled bottle contain? If you answered “Whole milk” then you’re obviously not ready to receive a jug of my love. So I’ll just pour it in someone else’s coffee.
Have you ever really wanted to be able to do something, but you came across a roadblock of some kind? You have a difficult choice. I made that choice once and it changed my whole life, by giving me experiences I never would have had if I took the eas...
MAN, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent ra...
But what they find most amazing and despicable is the insanity of those who all but worship the rich, to whom they owe nothing and who can do them no harm; they do so for no other reason except that they are rich, knowing full well that they are so m...
A cell in our body may recognize that it is part of a greater whole, but it may never be able to define all that is beyond it simply because of its limited perceptive capacity. Likewise, all that makes up the universal consciousness will always lie j...
It had replayed in her mind, over and over, growing in importance till it seemed her whole life could be slotted into two categories. Life before the kiss, and life after the kiss. Her life before the kiss had moved step by step ever closer to the pr...
This new co-consciousness brought me to a state of awareness in which my core personality was directly able to experience "her" personality. Being co-conscious with her, he explained, would stop me from experiencing the feeling of leaving my body or ...
Simon would have felt both honored and love, except mostly he felt weird, because he had only a few broken fragments of memory that said he knew these people at all, and a whole lifetime of memories that said they were armed, overly intense strangers...
He treats the person as if they were fully whole. We become what others expect us to be. Dad expected me to get better and even assumed I would have something helpful to say. Funny how we rise and fall to the assumptions of others.
I once faced a temptation that was so persistent and so overwhelming that I literally believed my whole world would go dark if I refused to give in to it," he said. "All I could do was scream to the Holy Spirit to keep me from it.
The inimitable stories of Tong-King never have any real ending, and this one, being in his most elevated style, has even less end than most of them. But the whole narrative is permeated with the odour of joss-sticks and honourable high-mindedness, an...
That way I wouldn't have to see the guys in their walking shorts. They looked as if nothing had ever touched them- all well-mothered, protected, with a soft sheet of contentment. None of them had ever been in jail, or worked hard with their hands, or...
Each man lives for himself, uses his freedom to achieve his personal goals, and feels with his whole being that right now he can or cannot do such-and-such an action; but as soon as he does it, this action, committed at a certain moment in time, beco...