We all have such stories. It is a brutal arithmetic. But I - I am alive. You are alive. As long as we breathe, we can see and hear. As long as we can remember, all those gone before are alive inside u...
The others are all common mouths chattering, empty heads like wooden whistles blowing common tunes.
Happy-ever-after is a fairy-tale notion, not history. I know of no woman who escaped from Chelmno alive.
All around me, grown-up voices called out, Amen! as if the word was a hall pass into Heaven.
For it began to occur to him that one way to become private was to respect another's privacy.
What is a vow... but the mouth repeating what the heart has already promised?
The great archetypal stories provide a framework or model for an individual's belief system. They are, in Isak Dinesen's marvelous expression, 'a serious statement of our existence.' The stories and t...
Now you must close your eyes. Yes, that is it. Selinda, you, too. Good. Good. Bring in the dark that I may teach you to breathe. For it is breath that is behind words. And words that are the shapers o...
I do not know where I am going or what I will do when I get there. I know only that to put one foot in front of the other, moves me on, away from you to a place, where I do not want to be.
He unpacks his bag of taleswith fingers quickas a weaver's picking the weft threads threading the warp.Watch his fingers.Watch his lipsspeaking the old familiar words: All those threadspulling us back...
Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscle...
Happily Ever AfterImagine them allafter the plotting, after the ball,after the spelling, hopping, sweeping,grumping, grousing, mopping, sleeping,from small glass shoe to nuisance pea,so ever after, al...
Hans was never good at giving proper answers. He always had different answers in his head, odd answers, answers that his teachers and his parents and his grandmother and even his crazy grandfather see...
Aren't hidden doors the most alluring? The old stories point that out surely. Even the greatest heroes and heroines fall under the spell of a locked door.
You may adore Love You Forever, but I hear it as a story about an overbearing and smothering mother who infantilizes her son and can only tell him she loves him when he is fast asleep. I also contend...
You know how it is: as soon as you decide to forget something, your brain comes to the conclusion that it's the most fascinating thing in the world.
You are a name, not a number. Never forget that name, whatever they tell you here. You will always be Chaya—life—to me.
The thing about endings is, they can begin quietly enough. That's how they sneak up on you.
Somewhere becomes a nightmare. I knock on no doors, make no phone calls. Nowhere becomes my destination. You can find it on the blank spaces of any free map in any old store. Just turn a corner of you...
People were dying around us, of starvation, tuberculosis, cholera, typhus, typhoid, deportation, influenza, heartbreak. Their lungs were filling up because of the cold. They were being shot for walkin...