Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair. But the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time. And I feel...
What is unthinkable is undoable.
Well, whatever one thinks of the Roman Church, it is a worthy and powerful foe. I could accept that sort of conversion with grace. But I shall be very disappointed indeed if we lose him to the Presbyt...
Well, the Dutch invented the microscope, she said. They were jewelers, grinders of lenses. They want it all as detailed as possible because even the tiniest things mean something.
Well if you wake up intending to murder someone at two o’clock, you hardly think what you’re going to feed the corpse for dinner.Aspargus is in season, said Francis helpfully.
Well - think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, made no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no - hang on - this is a question worth struggling with. What...
We drank our tea. The lamplight was warm and the apartment still and snug. At home in bed, in my private abyss of longing, the scenes i dreamed of always began like this: drowsy drunken hour, the two...
We are so customed to disguise ourselves to others that, in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.
We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.
We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves. — FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Understand, by saying ‘God,’ I am merely using ‘God’ as a reference to long-term pattern we can’t decipher. Huge, slow-moving weather system rolling in on us from afar, blowing us randomly like— But—m...
Tuve la revelación de que la risa era luz, y la luz risa, y que ese era el secreto del universo.
Tulips, I thought, staring at the jumble of letters before me. Had the ancient Greeks known them under a different name, if they’d had tulips at all? The letter psi, in Greek, is shaped like a tulip....
Took
Too much—too tempting—to have my hands on it and not look at it. Quickly I slid it out, and almost immediately its glow enveloped me, something almost musical, an internal sweetness that was inexplica...
Three years is a long time. It is to us. But in the scheme of things—not at all. I mean, said Andy reasonably, look at some poor dumb bunny like Sabine Ingersoll or that idiot James Villiers. Forrest...
Three coffees, two with milk, please, said Francis to the fat woman behind the counter. No milk, just Cremora. Well, then, just black, I guess. He turned to us. Have you seen the paper this morning?
They were a pair of white mice, I thought—only Kitsey was a spun-sugar, fairy-princess mouse whereas Andy was more the kind of luckless, anemic, pet-shop mouse you might feed to your boa constrictor....
They took the wrong ones! Mistake was made! Everything is unfair! Who do we complain to, in this shitty place? Who is in charge here?]
There’s a pattern and we’re a part of it. Yet if you scratched very deep at that idea of pattern (which apparently he had never taken the trouble to do), you hit an emptiness so dark that it destroyed...