So, what if your entire body was, oh I don’t know, dropped into molten metal?” Nick laughed. “Like the end of ? Good question. If there’s even a single cell remaining, it can regrow my whole body. But even if there a single cell left, then an...
At the Nuremberg trials, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt described the actions and the architects of the Holocaust with a simple, memorable phase--saying that the whole lot represented 'the banality of evil.' Her long ago words applied well t...
The man who takes up nothing but a newspaper, but reads it to think, to deduct conclusions from its premises, and form a judgment on its opinions, is more fitted for society than he, who having all the current literature and devoting his whole time t...
I'm here!" I said..."I'm read to go home!" As if they couldn't see me. As if I couldn't remember what it had been like, fluttering next to someone's ear and whispering into it. How the whole earth was like a musical instrument that we could play effo...
As far as how my mom might view me, I can imagine her saying something like this to me: “You may be ugly, son, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be rich. In fact, it kind of means you have to be rich. At least if you don’t want to be asexual an...
It’s a shiny tin can of a day, bright but gray. Welcome to one of Florida’s two overcast days per year. A Florida winter can last a brutally long 48 hours, and in that time the state’s residents don’t know how to cope. Probably there are more...
The Gospel writers are not really interested primarily in the facts of the birth but in the significance, the meaning for them of that birth just as the people who love us are not really interested primarily in the facts of our births but in what it ...
She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund ...
There was always a big party on the night before anyone left for the States. They called it an American wake, because the whole community stayed up to keep the emigrants company through their last night on the island, just as they would have bidden f...
Jesus is the answer to the longing of every human heart. The love of his heart is the only love capable of filling our human longing—because it is human, yet infinite, and because it is also divine. Not only does each individual need and desire thi...
I've spent all the years since full of guilt and misery, even though I didn't remember it. I've let it run my thoughts, my plans, my whole life. But the experience doesn't own me. I own it. What I do with it is up to me, just like what Molly does wit...
Okay, how about it meaning that two people realize they love each other so much that they can never replace each other. It means that they die a little every time they have to be apart. It means they suddenly want to do crazy stuff together like buy ...
If you aren’t ready, you spend your whole life perseverating on that one situation, getting it wrong time and again. I like to think I am a woman who learns her lesson, but the trick is that you can only ever understand your life backwards, but you...
Sometimes I think I spent forever waiting for you,' he says. 'My whole life, I've never had someone like you. Someone who doesn't have to be there, but is anyway. Someone who wants to just ... be with me because they want me. For me. Not because I'm ...
Creed scowls. "Hardly. All he does now is mope like a goddamn teenage girl. Anytime I'm home, he's in his room with the door locked. I'm telling you guys, he got worked over really bad in San Diego. I thought the whole point of having a gay brother w...
The worst of such stories is that the triumphant romancers can always be put to confusion and crushed by the very details in which real life is so rich and which these unhappy and involuntary story-tellers neglect as insignificant trifles. Oh, they h...
What a nuisance is the friend who must have this and that, whose likes and hates are infinite, with bitter and loud voiced complaint about the whole of circumstance? How pleasant are the truly great who, wanting nothing, are content with anything. Ac...
It was one of those bitter mornings when the whole of nature is shiny, brittle, and hard, like crystal. The trees, decked out in frost, seem to have sweated ice; the earth resounds beneath one's feet; the tiniest sounds carry a long way in the dry ai...
You do not see deviantly gendered people walking around with Nalgene bottles, getting our sixty-four recommended ounces as we go through our days. I am sure that somewhere there is an argument to be made that the trans community as a whole is a littl...
I have a whole set of problem-solving behaviors and I am anxious to use them, in much the same way that I would stand up on the train to give my seat to someone who seems to need it more than I do: here is something I can address, and I do, and all i...
Sorrow comes with so many defense mechanisms. You have your shock, your denial, your getting wasted, your cracking jokes, and your religion. You also have the old standby catchall--the blind belief in fate, the whole "things happening for a reason" d...
