[I]n Africa I was a member of a family—of a sort of family that the people of your culture haven't known for thousands of years. If gorillas were capable of such an expression, they would tell you that their family is like a hand, of which they are...
Until recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the older generation (which had itself confessed to the same crime short years before). The c...
I was nineteen years five months old when I fell in love for the first time. This seemed to me a profound, advanced age; never can we anticipate being older than we are, or wiser; if we're exhausted, it's impossible to anticipate being strong; as, in...
It's always hard to remember love - years pass and you say to yourself, Was I really in love, or was I just kidding myself? Was I really in love, or was I just pretending he was the man of my dreams? Was I really in love, or was I just desperate?
Getting to this point hasn't always been easy; it took me years to really learn to silence my mind. But as you move through your career and your life, you will have to learn that if you're not what you do, then what you do has no business keeping you...
You wouldn't know it, from some of the things I've said over the years, but I like people... I do... I like people, but I like them in short bursts. I don't like people for extended periods of time. I'm all right with them for a little while, but onc...
I'm a big believer in first impressions," he finally said. "Tell me what your first thought was when Jason walked into the courtroom." Taylor took a sip of her drink and grinned. This one was easy. "I vowed to hate him forever." Jeremy's brown eyes t...
She has the kind of beauty that takes your breath from your lungs, tears from your eyes and speeds your heart each time you look at her. She has the kind of beauty reserved for works of art, where men spend years of their life mastering their craft t...
During his hajj, Malcolm [Malcolm X] fell into a new Islam with the same blind faith that he had given to Elijah. Since he lived just a year after his hajj, Mecca became the neatly presented and cinema-friendly conclusion to his lifelong thread of tr...
We are here because over billions of years, countless variables fell into place, any of which could have taken another path. We are essentially a beautiful fluke, as are the millions of other species with which we share this planet. Our cells are com...
As the excesses of 'molecular gastronomy' have slowly faded away, like the smell of a particularly pungent fart, a breath of fresh culinary air has swept across the country. I've been passionately interested in food and drink for more than 30 years a...
The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don’t mind admitting it. They worship money and po...
It was a mistake to think of houses, old houses, as being empty. They were filled with memories, with the faded echoes of voices. Drops of tears, drops of blood, the ring of laughter, the edge of tempers that had ebbed and flowed between the walls, i...
I live my life in widening circle That reach out across the world. I may not ever complete the last one, But I give myself to it. I circle around God, that primordial tower. I have been circling for thousands of years, And I still don't know: am I a ...
CALL YOURSELF Look deep in the mirror And say: 'I LOVE YOU' And immediately An electric current will Ripple throughout your soul And burst through your eyes Like shooting stars Dancing across the skies In ecstasy. To tell your soul you love it - Is l...
Thousands of years ago, when our ancestors encountered a predatory animal like a lion, it was best to react immediately and not stand around thinking about the lion, admiring its beauty or wondering why it was bothering them instead of tracking down ...
Even at the time—twenty years old—I said to myself: better to go hungry, to go to prison, to be a tramp, than to sit at an office desk ten hours a day. There is no particular daring in this vow, but I have not broken it and shall not do so. The w...
Tell him I said that he will know when he's my age that books aren't written on whims or old promises. Books are written on years turned inside out by ideas that never let go until you get them in print, and even then writing's a last resort, a despe...
People change spouses more often than they clean out closets. And every time they say, 'This is the one. This is the person I'm going to spend eternity with.' Then forty or fifty years go by and you're just sick of each other, utterly sick, and it's ...
We are happy to observe an increasing frequency of these pedestrian tours: to walk, is, beyond all comparison, the most independent and advantageous mode of travelling; Smelfungus and Mundungus may pursue their journey as they please; but it grieves ...
She loved him, and she was going to do everything she could to get him back. She hadn’t come this far just to walk away. He was the love of her life, dammit. The man she wanted to marry. The world had reversed its orbit to bring them back together,...
