The bottom line was that he didn't want to die. As far as he was concerned, death was the problem. The basic human problem. Everyone's problem. He wasn't any different from anyone else, but there was...
He had visited his family the evening before, eaten dinner with Renee and Chris, his grandson, in the pretence that everything was ordinary, but in fact to service his end-game ruse. He was going over...
When it's time to confess, you don't know what you're saying. Are you telling the truth, or do you confuse your lies with reality? The question is comical. The answer is lost in the maelstroms of cons...
It ate at whatever was warm nearby, and then the coldness settled in permanently. You learned to live with it
The color of the sky was like a length of white chalk turned on its side and rubbed into asphalt. Sanded--that was how the world looked, worked slowly down to no rough edges.
The world was incomprehensibly intricate, and yet this forest made a simple sense in her heart that she felt nowhere else.
[Ishmael] listened to the world turned silent by the snow; there was absolutely nothing to hear. The silence of the world roared steadily in his ears while he came to recognize that he did not belong...
Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and t...
The prospect of death in autumn, she said, was irrelevant next to its happy recognition of its participation in the life of the tree itself.
We Japanese, on the other hand, know our egos are nothing. We bend our egos, all of the time, and that is where we differ. That is the fundamental difference, Hatsue. We bend our heads, we bow and are...
As soon as he was gone, we opened, Baucis and Philemon. An elderly couple living in a cottage, they're granted a wish by Jove. They confer in private before Philemon asks, May one hour take us both aw...
He had watched her, after all, mourn her husband's death and it had been for her in part the discovery that grief could attach itself with permanence - something Ishmael had already discovered. It att...
For them it might stave off what he could not help but see with clarity: that the world was silent and cold and bare and that in this lay its terrible beauty.
To die, he thought, was to escape passion's grasp, but that was the last thing he wanted. Instead he wished to be seized by passion and pinioned, held in its palm forever—he could not imagine any othe...
The strange thing was, he wanted to like everyone. He just couldn't find a way to do it.
An argument ensued about abundance, leisure, work, nature, and what a second girl kept calling 'the American way.' When I asked her what she meant by 'the American way,' she said, 'Basically the destr...
Today and in a good winter mood, someone not subject to seasonal affective disorder, someone with a generous
He didn't like very many people any more, or very many things either. He preferred not to be this way, but there it was, he was like that. His cynicism, a veteran's cynicism, was a thing that disturbe...
He hoped it would snow recklessly and bring to the island the impossible winter purity, so rare and precious, he remembered fondly from his youth.
I'd rather know I can trust you. So before you read what's in that thing, tell me a story that squares with its details and exonerate yourself in my eyes. Tell me the story you should have told the sh...
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