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...
People appeared enormously foolish to him. He understood that they were only animated cavities full of jelly and strings and liquids.
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 decided then that he would love her forever no matter what came to pass. It was not so much a matter of deciding as accepting the inevitability of it.
I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in f...
The rain fell with such fervor that the world disappeared.
[H]e had this view of things - that most human activity was utter folly, his own included, and that his existence in the world made others nervous.
Tell the truth,' Nels said. 'Decide to tell the truth before it's too late.
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 don't feel anything either way. No feeling about it comes to me - it's not something I have a choice about. Isn't a feeling like that supposed to happen? I can't make a feeling like that up, can I?...
They were taken from Anacortes on a train to a transit camp—the horse stables at the Puyallup fairgrounds. They lived in the horse stalls and slept on canvas army cots; at nine p.m. they were confined...
One thing has led to the next in my life, but like lines of a poem. I suppose I've thrown in my lot with love, and don't know any other way to go on breathing.
The world was incomprehensibly intricate, and yet this forest made a simple sense in her heart that she felt nowhere else.[S]he wanted only her own strawberry farm, the fragrance of the fields and the...
The whites, you see, are tempted by their egos and have no means to resist. 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. T...
The snowfall obliterated the borders between the fields and made Kabuo Miyamoto's long-cherished seven acres indistinguishable from the land that surrounded them. All human claims to the landscape wer...
Losing is like knowing that, in the movie scene where a thousand die but the hero lives, you're one of the obliterated.
I can't tell you what to do, Ishmael. I've tried to understand what it's been like for you - having gone to war, having lost your arm, not having married or had children. I've tried to make sense of i...
How could they say that they truly loved each other? They had simply grown up together, been children together, and the proximity of it, the closeness of it, had produced in them love s illusion. And...
To deny that there was this dark side of life would be like pretending that the cold of winter was somehow only a temporary illusion, a way station on the way to the higher reality of long, warm, plea...
To acclimate students to misery under the rubric that so doing prepares them for life is a cynical notion—and a horrifying one.