The unvisited grannies, in stone houses by the wheat field, can't remember their husbands or children. They worry their hands, though, hands that could do with a rinsing. The grannies think:We start o...
The truth isn't a thing of fact or reason. It is simply what everyone agrees on.
The small gesture of charity? Isn’t that sort of beauty more beautiful than any other? And equally evanescent, says the Master, for small charities cannot this wicked world amend. But perhaps charity...
The overdressed traveller betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing, while the true traveller knows that the novel world about her serves as the most appropriate accessory.
The moon rose, an opalescent goddess tipping light from her harsh maternal scimitar.
The funeral was modest, a love-her-and-shove-her affair.
The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. It is, on the whole, a merciful arrangement. We are not condemned to sustained flights of b...
That was what was once believed. Now, it seems hardly to matter when and how we become ourselves – or even what we become. Theory chases theory about how we are composed. The only constant: the abjura...
Such silly things, children—and so embarrassing—because they keep changing themselves out of shame, out of a need to be loved or something.
Still, there is no law that says all decent things must be permanent. Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need atta...
Speaking uses us up, speeds us up. Without prayer, that act of confession for merely existing, one might live forever and not know it.
Sooner or later we grow into deserving our own deaths, somehow.
Some said the original evil was the vacuum caused by the Fairy Queen Lurline leaving us alone here. When goodness removes itself, the space it occupies corrodes and becomes evil and maybe slpits apart...
Some lives are like steps and stairs, every period an achievement built on a previous success. Other lives hum with the arc of the swift spear. Only ever one thing, that dedicated life, from start to...
So Oxford, at its inception a huddle of theologicians and divines, grew into a city of dreams, and much good may come of that. Little surprise that Middle-earth and Narnia were both discovered here.
She dropped her shyness like a nightgown, and in the liquid glare of sunlight on old boards she held up her hands-as if, in the terror of the upcoming skirmish, she had at last understood that she was...
SELF-MOCKERY IS AN UGLIER THING THAN ANY HUMAN FACE, IRIS... YOU ARE SMART AND YOU ARE KIND. DON'T BETRAY THOSE IMPULSES IN YOURSELF. DON'T BELABOR THE LACK OF PHYSICAL BEAUTY, WHICH IN ANY CASE EVENT...
People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us. It's people who claim that they're good, or anyway better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.
Para mí, ése es el auténtico poder del arte. No amonestar, sino provocar y desafiar. De otro modo, ¿para qué molestarse?
Only, sometimes, in the text of a book here and there, we tap the page with a finger and say, This is what my lost days were like. Something like this.