Also I could hear Amanda’s voice: Why are you being so weak? Love’s never a fair trade. So Jimmy’s tired of you, so what, there’s guys all over the place like germs, and you can pick them like flowers and toss them away when they’re wilted....
It is not in vain that the strategic criterion of placing only short runs on the market prevails in order simultaneously to create a feeling of scarcity and avoid an appearance of uniformity, both of which encourage consumer demand. This is such a po...
The country he had left thirty years ago had been a realistic place. There were political realities there, then and now, that precluded blind faith, that discouraged one from thinking that everything, always, would work out fairly and equitably. But ...
Lumani had never managed a failed delivery because, in the end, no matter how skilled or how hard they fought back, pressure applied in the right places caused even the strongest men to fracture. But this one? He'd watched her. Studied her. Observed ...
Modern man has successfully razed the imaginative landscapes of primal peoples the whole world over. Kill the gods first, slaughter the sacred animals, rewrite the mythologies, and build roads through the holy places. Do all this and watch the people...
This is the moment I have dreaded, the very reason why we kept running, even when it seemed hopeless. We all seemed to believe if we kept running, we would never die. But what exactly had we been hoping to find in the end? A magical place where the i...
Each time I say good-bye to a place I like, I feel like I am leaving a part of me behind. I guess whether we choose to travel as much as Marco Polo did or stay in the same spot from cradle to grave, life is a sequence of births and deaths. Moments ar...
One of the rules says, You can study God through everything and everyone in the universe, because God is not confined in a mosque, synagogue, or church. But if you are still in need of knowing where exactly His abode is, there is only one place to lo...
And when you try to live there, to live in a place where you're betraying yourself over and over, not only do you grow to resent the hell out of it, and resent the hell out of whomever you're betraying and censoring yourself for, but the very idea of...
With intimacy comes the possibility of “engulfment” or being taken hostage by the demands of others. We may have distorted perceptions of the “demands” and obligations placed upon us by those who claim to love us. Trusting that love to be unc...
And could you, from a place of love, actually stand up and, use force, to give someone back, the suffering, they were trying to put on you? Would I do it? Maybe it would even be, an act of fierce compassion, as Enso Roshi sometimes talked about, to n...
Try it again," I said. "Kiss me." "No," he said. "Kiss me." "No," And then he smiled. "You kiss me." I placed my hand on the back of his neck. I pulled him toward me. And kissed him. I kissed him. And I kissed him. And I kissed him. And I kissed him....
For as long as I can remember, my father saved. He saves money, he saves disfigured sticks that resemble disfigured celebrities, and most of all, he saves food. Cherry tomatoes, sausage biscuits, the olives plucked from other people's martinis --he h...
One of these people was a girl who exemplified everything I could ever come up with to want. We grew very close very quickly and revealed dreams and compared fears and mocked gently and occasionally told lies, but nothing bad. The sex, I’m sorry, D...
She had wandered, without rule or guidance, into a moral wilderness... Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods... The scarlet letter was her passport into region...
exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is tru...
I lack the imagination. For that reason I have to pack, stuff into my pockets odds and ends, passport, money, and go see what it's really like. Whenever the time of year or the weather changes, I have to pack up whatever I can't do without and visit ...
How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses, and enthralls us...
Even now all possible feelings do not yet exist. There are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written, or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else imposs...
No art takes places without inspiration. Every artist also needs effective knowledge of his or her tools (e.g., does a certain brush function well with a particular kind of paint?). What’s more, artists need effective techniques for using those too...
The ballpark is the star. In the age of Tris Speaker and Babe Ruth, the era of Jimmie Foxx and Ted Williams, through the empty-seats epoch of Don Buddin and Willie Tasby and unto the decades of Carl Yastrzemski and Jim Rice, the ballpark is the star....
