One notorious named Hiwa al-Balkhi, writing in ninth-century Persia, offered two hundred awkward questions to the faithful. He drew upon himself the usual thunderous curses—'may his name be forgotten, may his bones be worn to nothing'—along with ...
When the late Pope John Paul II decided to place the woman so strangely known as on the fast track for beatification, and thus to qualify her for eventual sainthood, the Vatican felt obliged to solicit my testimony and I thus spent several hours in a...
Signs imply ways of living, possibilities of existence, they are the symptoms of an overflowing (jaillissante) or exhausted (épuisée) life. But an artist cannot be content with an exhausted life, nor with a personal life. One does not write with on...
When a bull is being lead to the slaughter, it still hopes to break loose and trample its butchers. Other bulls have not been able to pass on the knowledge that this never happens and that from the slaughterhouse there is no way back to the herd. But...
When evening comes, I go back home, and go to my study. On the threshold I take off my work clothes, covered in mud and filth, and put on the clothes an ambassador would wear. Decently dressed, I enter the ancient courts of rulers who have long since...
There were pools of light among the stacks, directly beneath the bulbs which Philip had switched on, but it was now with an unexpected fearfulness that he saw how the books stretched away into the darkness. They seemed to expand as soon as they reach...
It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; He is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is He who provoked you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settl...
Leaning into the afternoons I cast my sad nets towards your oceanic eyes. There in the highest blaze my solitude lengthens and flames, its arms turning like a drowning man's. I send out red signals across your absent eyes that smell like the sea or t...
Don't go far off, not even for a day, because I don't know how to say it - a day is long and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep. Don't leave me, even for an hour, because then the l...
I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair. Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets. Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps. I hunger for your sleek laugh, your hands the color of a sa...
Yo te he nombrado reina. Hay más altas que tú, más altas. Hay más puras que tú, más puras. Hay más bellas que tú, hay más bellas. Pero tú eres la reina. Cuando vas por las calles nadie te reconoce. Nadie ve tu corona de cristal, nadie mira ...
Yo no me callo Perdone el ciudadano esperanzado mi recuerdo de acciones miserables, que levantan los hombres del pasado. Yo predico un amor inexorable. Y no me importa perro ni persona: sólo el pueblo es en mí considerable: sólo la Patria a mí me...
There are times when every act, no matter how private or unconscious, becomes political. Whom you live with, how you wear your hair, whether you marry, whether you insist that your child take piano lessons, what are the brand names on your shelf; all...
It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory....
I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting the...
The most fortunate of us, in our journey through life, frequently meet with calamities and misfortunes which may greatly afflict us; and, to fortify our minds against the attacks of these calamities and misfortunes should be one of the principal stud...
In general, when a novel manipulates its material to conform to the pieties of the day, or alternatively to attack those pieties for no other reason than the visibility such an attack will generate, when its literary tropes are all too familiar, its ...
- "Surely you have considered terrorist activity?" There was another pause. Then the spokesman said, in the quiet tones of someone who has had enough and who is going to quit after this and raise chickens somewhere, "Yes, I suppose we must. All we ne...
The only things known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Weedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies th...
For her next birthday she'd asked for a telescope. Her mother had been alive then, and had suggested a pony, but her father had laughed and bought her a beautiful telescope, saying: "Of course she should watch the stars! Any girl who cannot identify ...
Hello, little girl," he said, which was only his first big mistake. "I'm sure want to know all about hedgehogs, eh?" "I did this one last year," said Tiffany. The man looked closer, and his grin faded. "Oh, yes," he said. "I remember. You asked all t...
