People have lost their history, the what and how and why of things. They know so little of the places where they live.
Were you always such a snake,” the child asked, “or did you grow into what you are?
Every place is the same place in the end.
Although words are the world and were the birthing of the world, there are no words to express what I felt at that moment, no words for the dimensions of my joy, for the great buoyancy that overcame my spirit, for the depth of my gratitude, for the brightness of my hope.
Acknowledge your fear, odd one. Fearlessness is for the insane and the arrogant. You are neither. Those who rely on you for their lives will be well served only if you fear what you should fear. You are a unique soul, a child of grace, but you can still fail yourself and others.
Waiting is one of the things that human beings cannot do well, though it is one of the essential things we must do successfully if we are to know happiness. We are impatient for the future and try to craft it with our own powers, but the future will come as it comes and will not be hurried. If we are good at waiting, we discover that what we wanted of the future, in our impatience, is no longer what we want, that waiting has brought wisdom.
Three more words. Be happy. Persevere.
That night, the sky poured out such torrents that the city was a drum set, every surface a source of rhythms, pavements and windows and canvas awnings, street signs and parked cars, Dumpsters throbbing like tom-toms, garbage-can lids swishing as the wind swirled bursts of rain in imitation of a drummer brush-stroking the batter head of a snare.
She was so nice to look at that Joe twice stabbed his left foot when he thought he was spearing a bit of litter, though neither wound was serious enough to require a tetanus shot.
Funny how people that don’t believe in nothin’ are so quick to believe every crazy story about people like us.
We were friends, never paramours. A lover who is enigmatic will most likely prove to be a cataclysm waiting to happen. But a charming friend whose usual warmth is raveled through moments of cool inscrutability can be an intriguing companion.
From birth to death we explore and seek, and in the end we arrive where we started, the past having made one great slow turn on a carousel to become our future, and if we have learned anything worth learning, the carousel will bring us to the one place we most need to be.
She sat watching the street and its businesses melt away in the thick tides of mist, partially re-form, and melt away again, over and over, as if some celestial power had ordered the end of the world but kept having second thoughts.
He needed some aromatherapy to clear his mind. He needed some time in the sauna. He felt stupid. He had never before felt stupid. His mother said stupidity should be a capital offense, except with so many stupid people everywhere you looked, there wouldn’t be enough steel in the world to build all the necessary guillotine blades or enough executioners to operate them.
What most people call truth is merely the surface, and under it lies a great depth of truth that they do not perceive.
Every failure hollows out my heart a little further, and no success is able to refill any of that emptiness.
You don’t find life by fleeing from it.
What’s gotten into you today? All evening.
After the church ceased to exist, an outfit calling itself the First Amendment Protection Society, Inc. – the largest operator of adult bookstores, topless bars, Internet porn sites, and karaoke cocktail lounges in the United States – intimidated.
Mother seemed to wish that she’d never had a childhood, perhaps because all delight was fleeting and because the promise of one day was not fulfilled even just until the next.