As a teacher, Kurt Vonnegut was easy, magnanimous. He didn't try to make his students into little Kurt Vonneguts. He respected material unlike his own and was startlingly humble about what he did. (I...
The best antidote I have found is to yearn for something. As long as you yearn you can't congeal: there is a forward motion to yearning.
If someone had really done you an ill turn and later came to you and said, I am truly sorry, would that mean as much to you as the burden of it has been intolerable to me? Remorse
One is taught by experience to put a premium on those few people who can appreciate you for what you are.
That's why I envy Justin here in no small way. Despite her unfortunate room, and all those milkmaids threatening to swallow her with their smiles ... she can start her life over and be anything she ch...
I believe that dreams transport us through the underside of our days and that if we wish to become acquainted with the dark side of what we are the signposts are there waiting for us to translate t...
What is memory but another narrative form?
There are things we can't undo, but perhaps there is a kind of constructive remorse that could transform regrettable acts into something of service to life.
The person in the song is really addressing a powerful and constant state of yearning more than he is any real lover. It's the state of this yearning that torments him, yet he also loves his torment....
It was more like I saw him coming and knew he was the one. I went out of myself to meet him and then couldn’t get back inside without bringing him with me.
A person always has control over how she meets her adversities, and the good news is that the facing of them, one after another, year after year, builds an inner strength that nobody can take away fro...
All beautiful, dangerous idols fall, I thought, if you keep your eye on them long enough.
Yes, if you believed in words, if you lived by words,
The human mind, as we know from personal experience, is a chronic time traveler, but we are repeatedly amazed by its ability to hitch up the body, the body that resides the only place it can— in prese...
Because you’re a child and you have no way to compare your life to other people’s lives. Your foremost need is to stay safe within the only life you know.
When I was in seminary, Father Edward had told other guests around the table when he was purchasing his books, my spiritual director told me not to read theology. 'Read novels,' he said, and I have.
She was her steady self again, the one about whom Nonie had said, I admire that woman. Despite all her adversities, Beryl Jones manages to stay in control her days.
Nonie often remarked that every one of us needed to get away from other people and replenish our personal reserves.
In friendships . . . the requisits are always the same. Each provides the other with a refuge in time of trouble, with a continuum to fall back on in time of self-doubt, with an underpinning of earned...
Discontent, Father Maturin said, enunciating the word with a strange vigor and looking straight at Elizabeth, may be God’s catapult, His way of saying: ‘Go and try yourself now.