It is not possible to control the outside of yourself until you have mastered your breathing space. It is not possible to change anything until you understand the substance you wish to change.
It is necessary to go through life a little blunted, a little cloaked, how else to bear even a single day? The horror and the glory would overwhelm me. Papa used to talk about the story of the burning...
In this life you have to be your own hero.By that I mean you have to win whatever it is that matters to you by your own strength and in your own way.Like it or not, you are alone in a forest, just lik...
In their world good manners and good sense prevail. They don’t imagine that to choose sensibly is to set a time-bomb under yourself. They don’t imagine you are ripe for the cutting, waiting for your c...
In the secret places of her thymus gland Louise is making too much of herself. Her faithful biology depends on regulation but the white T-cells have turned bandit. They don't obey the rules. They are...
In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at until you understood them, they couldn't change halfway through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.
In the cell was a rack, a winch, a furnace, a set of branding irons, a pot for melting wax, nails of different lengths. A thumbscrew, a pair of flesh-tongs, heavy tweezers, a set of surgical instrumen...
In Venice, a long time ago, when we had our own calendar and stayed aloof from the world, we began the days at night. What use was the sun to us when our trade and our secrets and our diplomacy depend...
If you think about something for long enough,' she explained, `more than likely, that thing will happen.' She tapped her head. `It's all in the mind.
If we had the courage to love we would not so value these acts of war.
If the demons lie within they travel with you. Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception.
I went outside, tripping over slabs of sunshine the size of towns. The sun was like a crowd of people, it was a party, it was music. The sun was blaring through the walls of houses and beating down th...
I walked out to brood on this life of ours, which seems from birth to death to be a steady loss, disguised by sudden gains and happiness, which persuade us of good fortune, when all the while the glas...
I thought of my often-dream where Time poured the fishes into the sky and the sky was full of star fish; stella maris of the upper air.
I think of love as a force of nature-as strog as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming,as drought-making as it is life-giving.
I stretched out my hands, holding the falling sun in one hand, and the climbing moon in the other, my silver and gold, my gift from life. My gift of life. My life is a hesitation in time. An opening i...
I say I appear naked before you, but so often I whistle for my invisible armed guard; the gap-toothed, jeering, club-headed mob, my feelings, that are used to having me to themselves.
I sat at the back, listening to the music or mumbling through the sevice. I'm never tempted by God, but I like his trappings.
I read: This is one moment, / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy.I started to cry.
I love you.You've loved other people but you still left them.It's not that simple.I don't want to be another scalp on your pole.