This was once Mazama, I kept reminding myself. This was once a mountain that stood nearly 12,000 feet tall and then had its heart removed. This was once a wasteland of lava and pumice and ash. This was once an empty bowl that took hundreds of years t...
To be mad is to feel with excruciating intensity the sadness and joy of a time which has not arrived or has already been. And to protect their delicate vision of that other time, madmen will justify their condition with touching loyalty, and surround...
He knew that he, Millat, was a Paki no matter where he came from; that he smelled of curry; had no sexual identity; took other people’s jobs; or had no job and bummed off the state; or gave all the jobs to his relatives; that he could be a dentist ...
I suppose you had to," Wes said when Phin went back to join him at the table. "Pretty much. She seduced me." "Yeah, right," Wes said. "She said, 'Please fix the kitchen drain,' and you interpreted that--" "She said, 'Fuck me.' " Phin put two balls on...
Sophie held the [hand]cuffs higher, hopint to instill some sense of shame, if not in him, then at least in herself. One look at him and she wanted him again. "I found them in the bed." "That makes sense," Phin said. "That's where I lost them." "I'd a...
I didn't mean to tell you," Mrs. Whatsit faltered. "I didn't mean ever to let you know. But oh, my dears, I did so love being a star!" "Yyouu are sstill verry yyoungg," Mrs Witch said, her voice faintly chiding. The Medium sat looking happily at the ...
Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty s...
As the years pass, I am coming more and more to understand that it is the common, everyday blessings of our common everyday lives for which we should be particularly grateful. They are the things that fill our lives with comfort and our hearts with g...
How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny jar. There is a spark there. Next moment a flush of dun. Then a vapour as...
With such luck as this, he rode the beast in the jaunty way that she deserved, back north, seemingly back from Mexico, pulling up finally at an outlying bar-ex-saloon (they had covered the old adobe face with knotty pine, substituted big stone matade...
When the girl returned, some hours later, she carried a tray, with a cup of fragrant tea steaming on it; and a plate piled up with very hot buttered toast, cut thick, very brown on both sides, with the butter running through the holes in great golden...
George, who is out somewhere there in the dark, who is good to me - whom I revile, who can keep learning the games we play as quickly as I can change them. Who can make me happy and I do not wish to be happy. And yes, I do wish to be happy. George an...
That wasn't enough. They weren't enough. Nor, she soon realized, was Will, though by every rational measure he ought to have been. ... He became ardent, spoke of love, hinted at marriage. She stilled his roving hands and deflected his near-proposals....
The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time by making it possible to maximize the time and place for production and minimize the unstructured travel time in between…Too, the rhetoric of efficiency ...
There came to him an image of man’s whole life upon the earth. It seemed to him that all man’s life was like a tiny spurt of flame that blazed out briefly in an illimitable and terrifying darkness, and that all man’s grandeur, tragic dignity, h...
I say, "Well then I don't know if it was real, and that makes me feel like I'm going insane again." "Absolutely it was real. It was a real, partial picture. Because it ended preemptively, things you would have learned about him in the relationship, y...
It's like he has emotional amnesia... I think you have to accept that the person you knew isn't there at the moment. I was witness to how much he loved you. I have the photos. This isn't the person we knew. I don't recognize this person. He's shed hi...
The willingness to undertake such action cannot be based on certainties, but on those possibilities glimpsed in a reading of history different from the customary painful recounting of human cruelties. In such a reading we can find not only war but re...
I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and...
I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel, all those daubes and albóndigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, st...
John says if I don't pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall. But I don't want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once, and she says he is just like John and my brother, only more so! Besides, it is such an u...
