I felt tired and grainy and not able to tell how much damage had been done to me. I had a leaden feeling that it was more than I really needed.
When you’re travelling far, it’s best to travel light.
I feel... I don’t know... like a bottle of soda that’s been shaken up. Do you know what I want? I want you to take me inside, and then take the cap off.
You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.
Paths cross all the time in this world of our, sometimes in the strangest places.
The CIA has been at the root of every dirty little war America has fought in this century. The CIA and dollar diplomacy.
Hands on a clock, numbers on a bathroom scale, weren’t they only ways of trying to measure invisible forces that had visible effects? A feeble effort to corral some greater reality beyond what mere humans thought of as reality? “Let it.
It wasn’t a top but a tower, a still spindle upon which all of existence moved and spun.
What a sour little doodad the telephone is, and what little good news we get from it!
Men still think the same things about us they have always thought, Ruth – I’m sure of it. A lot of them have learned to say the right things at the right times, but as my mother used to say, ‘Even a cannibal can learn to recite the Apostles’ Creed’.
Nasty thing that happened up there. It’s stayed in the town’s consciousness, too. Of course, tales of nastiness and murder are always handed down with slavering delight from generation to generation, while students groan and complain when they’re faced with a George Washington Carver or a Jonas Salk. But it’s more than that, I think. Perhaps it’s due to a geographical freak.
In a marriage, words are like rain. And the land of a marriage is filled with dry washes and arroyos that can become raging rivers in almost the wink of an eye. The therapists believe in talk, but most of them are either divorced or queer. It’s silence that is a marriage’s best friend.
In the matter of learned skills, memory comes to a fork in the road. Down one branch are the it’s-like-riding-a-bicycle skills; things which, once learned, are almost never forgotten. But the creative, ever-changing forebrain skills have to be practiced almost daily, and they are easily damaged or destroyed.
God, in His infinite wisdom, seemed much more generous when it came to doling out pain.
You sure?” Steve asked. “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy, you know.
But any man can lose his head. That’s what they don’t realise. Any man. Under the right set of circumstances.
The town motto seems to be if you can’t keep it on the down-low, then out you must go.
He read the way free-range cows graze, moving to wherever the grass is greenest. That was a thing her husband chose to ignore, because the strangeness of it frightened him. It frightened her as well, which was probably one reason why she knew nothing of Luke’s tutorial on Balkan history. He hadn’t told her because she hadn’t asked.
They stared at each other in the dark, frozen by the actual act as thought never could have done. Her very breath turned to glass in her throat. Then, inside, the laughter began.
God pounds his nails.