What a power I had discovered! I felt certain I could refill those bleacher seats – one day, I was sure, I could “see” everyone who’d been there; I could find that special someone my mother had waved to, at the end.
Things often are as they appear. First impressions matter.
Even Clark French’s novels exerted a tenacious and combative goodwill: his main characters, lost souls and serial sinners, always found redemption; the act of redeeming usually followed a moral low point; the novels predictably ended in a crescendo of benevolence.
Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there was no room for doubt, there would be no room for me. – FREDERICK BUECHNER.
It had been an evening in the empty dance hall when not even that depth of stone and the constant stirring of the ceiling fans could cool the stifling and humid night air, which had entered the Duckworth Club as heavily as a fog from the Arabian Sea. Even atheists, like Lowji, were praying for the monsoon rains. After.
And the thing about being in love,” Wally said to Angel, “is that you can’t force anyone. It’s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can’t interfere with people you love any more than you’re supposed to interfere with people you don’t even know. And that’s hard,” he added, “because you often feel like interfering – you want to be the one who makes the plans.
Every American should be forced to live outside the United States for a year or two. Americans should be forced to see how ridiculous they appear to the rest of the world!
Well, that boy’s voice,” my grandmother told me, “that boy’s voice could bring those mice back to life!” And it occurs to me now that Owen’s voice was the voice of all those murdered mice, coming back to life – with a vengeance.
With women, Ernie Holm had some experience at taking no for an answer.
We all go through a phase – it lasts a lifetime, for some of us – when we’re embarrassed by our parents; we don’t want them hanging around us because we’re afraid they’ll do or say something that will make us feel ashamed of them.
If you want to worry about something, you ought to worry about how Guadalupe was looking at you. Like she’s still making up her mind about you. Guadalupe hasn’t decided about you,” the clairvoyant child had told him.
As often as I feel certain that God exists, I feel as often at a loss to say what difference it makes – that He exists – or even: that to believe in God, which I do, raises more questions than it presents answers. Thus, when I am feeling my most faithful, I also feel full of a few hard questions that I would like to put to God – I mean, critical questions of the How-Can-He, How-Could-He, How-Dare-You variety.
It was best not to ask Pepe if reading or Jesus had saved him, or which one had saved him more.
I walked all the way through the Heldenplatz – the Plaza of Heroes – and stood where thousands of cheering fascists had greeted Hitler, once. I thought that fanatics would always have an audience; all one might hope to influence was the size of the audience.
But this is what we do: we dream on, and our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them. That’s what happens, like it or not. And because that is what happens, this is what we need: we need a good, smart bear.
The code of small towns is simple but encompassing: if many forms of craziness are allowed, many forms of cruelty are ignored. Piggy.
The chain of events, the links in our lives – what leads us where we’re going, the courses we follow to our ends, what we don’t see coming, and what we do – all this can be mysterious, or simply unseen, or even obvious.
It was Owen Meany who taught me that any good book is always in motion – from the general to the specific, from the particular to the whole, and back again. Good reading – and good writing about reading – moves the same way.
She say to tell you you was the nicest,” Muddy told the boy. “She say to tell your dad he a hero, and that you was the nicest.
But I had to keep my hands under the desk – my fists under the desk, I should say. The White House, that whole criminal mob, those arrogant goons who see themselves as justified to operate above the law – they disgrace democracy by claiming that what they do they do for democracy! They should be in jail. They should be in Hollywood! I know that some of the girls have told their parents that I deliver “ranting lectures” to them about the United States; some.