Love is a debt, she thought. When the bill comes, you pay in grief.
It no longer came as a surprise to John Candotti that people found him easy to confess to. He was tolerant of human failings and it was rarely difficult for him to say, Well, you screwed up. Everybody...
It didn’t occur to him to think that better is not the same as well. Was he fooling himself? He would not have said so. Even at twenty-two, when his diagnosis was confirmed, he was realistic. Most suf...
I do not want to spend another of whatever I have left bein' scared. I can't carry the fear anymore. Not mine. Not yours. I have to lay that burden down.
I am damned if I will spend my time listenin' to ungrammatical, repetitious, imbecilic nonsense without a challenge!
How can you hear your soul if everyone is talking? He said nothing more that day, but Ha’anala spent hours considering his words. A soul, she decided, was the most real part of a person, and to discov...
Hope—cruelest of the evils that escaped Pandora’s box—smiled on him gently all that summer.
Home, he said softly. If there is a more beautiful word in any language, I do not know it.
He was aware of his agnosticism, and patient with it. Rather than deny the existence of something he couldn’t perceive himself, he acknowledged the authenticity of his uncertainty and carried on, pray...
Tidy up before leaving for the day. When
There are still times when the thief I started out to be feels more authentic to me than the priest I’ve been for decades. To be pulled out of a slum and educated is to be an outsider forever— He stop...
Eternal beginner, starting over and over in a new place in new circumstances, with new languages, new people, a new commission. They had this in common: the continual rushed confrontation with change,...
When a man beats his boy, he wants a son who won't buck him. He's trying to make a coward. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it works.And the hundredth boy?We can go either way. Kill the old man, or...
Whatever you worship will consume you, Dong-Sing wrote one week. Bob Wright worships money. Wyatt Earp worships justice. Eddie Foy worships applause. Doc worships home and family, as I do. How will th...
They were beaten [bullies]. Ninety-nine out of a hundred still are, inside. A man beats his boy, he wants a son who won't buck him. He's trying to make a coward. Mostly, it works...That's why a bully...
There was a real sweetness to that man: a special sort of gentleness that you see sometimes in people who've been hurt bad but don't want revenge. [Bessie about James]
The world is filled with unreasonable hate. What's wrong with unreasonable love?
The irony is that each new war begins in hope: hope of restoring lost honor, hope of redressing injustices and reclaiming tarnished glory, hope of a grand new world. Each war ends with the black seeds...
The answer was clear, though he half-expected his hand to shrivel and turn black when he voted for a Republican.
Stability and order have always been paid for with captivity and blood. (76)