I was camped at the same site as her: Broughton Farm. She came over to my tent and showed me her blisters. She asked me whether I knew the reason why a blister can keep on producing fluid ad infinitum. I said that I had always wondered the same thing...
As became a young sinner, Sam [Mark Twain] had a special interest in Satan. He asked his Sunday school teacher questions about Eve in the garden, wondering "if he had ever heard of another woman who, being approached by a serpent, would not excuse he...
Some boys walk by and you cry, seeing them. They feel good, they look good, they are good. Oh, they're not above peeing off a bridge, or stealing an occasional dime-store pencil sharpener; it's not that. It's just, you know, seeing them pass, that's ...
Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity. They live inside the gift, know power, accept, and need not mention it. Why speak of time when you are Time, and shape the univers...
And then I wonder who looking at. All these people must have their dreams, too. And maybe that's why on the bus to New York City. Maybe they want to be dancers, or singers, or run big companies, or sell inventions. It's strange to try to think of eve...
At her gesture Michael cursed and caught her hand, falling suddenly atop her. She stared up at him wondering what bedchamber faux pas she’d committed. He groaned at her look. “I’ll let ye pet and play all ye want—after. Now I need”—he pus...
Cory wondered if maybe some people were better off dead. When you’re dead you don’t have to face the horrors of life, whether it’s striving to be the best, dealing with something bad you or somebody else did, dealing with someone’s death or a...
Press conference [on the movie ] yielded the usual crop of daftness. I've been asked if I related personally to Carrington's tortured relationship with sex and replied that no, not really, I'd had a very pleasant time since I was fifteen. This elicit...
Matsu gathered up what little was left of the food and wrapped it back up in the furoshiki. 'I followed you and the others down to the beach yesterday morning. I wondered if you might try to find your way to peace as she did.' 'I couldn't,' I began t...
Somehow, we’ve managed to create a social, cultural and political environment in which even our youngest citizens have been so deeply indoctrinated to hate. Who else, I wonder, have we indoctrinated them against? Little Muslim kids against Hindus? ...
All this occupied his thoughts when he revisited the places of his war. Tramping over soil fed by the blood of men he had led and whose faces now stirred in his memory, it was his wife's response that came - as if in compensation for too little said ...
There is something wonderful about a book. We can pick it up. We can heft it. We can read it. We can set it down. We can think of what we have read. It does something for us. We can share great minds, great actions, and great undertakings in the page...
I forgot how good it feels to be rooted. And to be rooted is not the same thing at all as being tied down. To be rooted is to say, here I am nourished and here will I grow, for I have found a place where every sunrise shows me how to be more than wha...
Like Mom, Zoe thought–like Mom used to. And that’s where they differed, for Zoe wrote quiet poetry suffused with twilight and questions. It’s not even good poetry, she thought. I don’t have talent, it’s her. I should be the one ill; she has...
Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. This retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters...
In college I took a social psychology course, something I thought useful for a career in advertising. Psychologists tested the story of the Good Samaritan. What they learned gives us reason to pause. The greatest determinant of who stopped to help th...
She never thought she'd be into sex that was so overwhelming and desperate, but after that night on the dining room table she started eyeing his furniture in a whole new way. Would he take her on the couch in the formal living room? Or how about the ...
Hello, Kanta. They're saying interesting things about you on the news," she said. "I wondered if you'd survived." "He didn't," I said. "I killed him." Silence. "I killed Mkhai, too," I said. "Tens of thousands of years, gone in the blink of an eye." ...
I think about that centurion from time to time and wonder, had he retired to a farm in Campagna, happy with his harvest of grapes and grandchildren, or had he fallen amongst his comrades on some distant, ruined field, defending the honor and the ever...
So the Bawdy Bluestocking was the proprietress of her own shop, selling lurid novels to ladies in the front and more esoteric fare in the back, from the looks of the shelves around him. He spied Pope and Crabbe, Shakespeare, of course, and names he d...
If art made you think, then this was Art. Staring at the ball, made of layers and layers of cloth, I wondered about the glass marble at its heart. What if you wanted to reach that marble? Make sure it was still whole? You'd have to remove the layers....
