I spent half my childhood in the shadows. Hiding from my father or my brother. Creeping from a place of solitude to another. Seeing while unseen, and pretending I was a part of what I saw. Making up a life where I wasn't an outcast.
I dusted my books off, placing each one—sorted alphabetically and by genre—on the shelves Dad installed. What some people might call “anal,” I’d call efficient. What good was it to have a book if you couldn’t find it when you wanted it?
The past is not a place I like to visit. This project is forcing me to go there, to tidy up my thoughts. I'm not normally a navel-gazer. I've always thought you find yourself in other people. I'm visiting here. I don't want to set up house.
A blanket could be used to keep people warm. But take it from me: you want to freeze those dead bodies as soon as they’re cold and lifeless, because you don’t want the bodies staying warm and decomposing while you’re looking for a place to disp...
People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do. They didn't own doodley-squat, so they couldn't improve their...
There is no law by which to determine the superiority of nations; hence the vanity of the claim, and the idleness of disputes about it. A people risen, run their race, and die either of themselves or in the hands of another, who, succeeding to their ...
All to often, suffering exists in a realm beyond vocabulary so we navigate that realm awkwardly, fumbling for the right words, hoping we can somehow approximate an understanding of matters that should never have to be understood by anyone in any plac...
A brick could be used to stall for time when the police are searching your place looking for a missing person. I kept telling them, I didn’t steal a person—I kidnapped a mannequin. Is that a crime?
Theatres are curious places, magician's trick-boxes where the golden memories of dramtic triumphs linger like nostalgic ghosts, and where the unexplainable, the fantastic, the tragic, the comic and the absurd are routine occurences on and off the sta...
In despair, he left that farm and came to Bone Gap when it was a huge expanse of empty fields, drawn here by the grass and the bees and the strange sensation that this was a magical place, that the bones of the world were little looser here, double-j...
The cafeteria in the Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital basement was the saddest place in the world—and forever it shall be—with its grim neon lights and gray tabletops and the diffuse foreboding of those who stepped away from suffering c...
Traveling further ingrained my desire to connect to a place other than an island that is slightly older, in a New World way, than the United States, especially after I found characteristics of my face in the faces of the people in my global community...
What she'd done was give him a glimpse of something that scared the bejesus out of him, something never meant for men like him that could start a hunger that would eat away what little was left inside him that didn't need to be shoved into the dark p...
That was the thing about Levantin: he loved the birds, but he really loved the places they brought him. When you spend your career in the confines of a gray suit, the pipits at dawn above timberline are even more wondrous.
We can retreat and retreat and let ourselves get backed into corners forever,” she’d said once. “Or we can go out and meet the enemy at the time and place we choose. Not them.” Okay, Tasha, I thought. Let’s see if your advice gets me killed...
I'd like to get away from earth awhile And then come back to it and begin over. May no fate wilfully misunderstand me And half grant what I wish and snatch me away Not to return. Earth's the right place for love: I don't know where it's likely to go ...
Weren't movies his generation's faith anyway--its true religion? Wasn't the theater our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, same guided emotions, same moral?...what was that bu...
As I came down the stairs, all attention turned from the girls, and everyone looked to me as though this were some sort of drama taking place on a stage, and I was the scorned lover come to confront my erstwhile beloved. I was not. I was just a whore...
Now take my hand and hold it tight. I will not fail you here tonight, For failing you, I fail myself And place my soul upon a shelf In Hell's library without light. I will not fail you here tonight.
Golden Rule Living is the great simplifier. It places us in another soul’s shoes, taking what can appear to be a com- plex decision that involves another and streamlining it to a one-step process of deciding, “If I wouldn’t like this done to me...
The spiritual things that you may not be able to see and feel are just as real as the things you can. God puts faith in place so you can believe in Him and all things spiritual without have it set before you in physical form.
