He had never missed God or the hope of heaven, but he had dearly wanted confession to rest his mind, Communion to let him touch something beyond Father Krone's dry, shaky hand, and holy water to taste...
Envy nobody. It is the true secret of happiness, or at least the only one I know. (By Moonlight)
But what I thought, and what I still think, and always will, is that she saw me. Nobody else has ever seen me — me, Jenny Gluckstein — like that. Not my parents, not Julian, not even Meena. Love is on...
Love was generous precisely because it could never be immortal.
Wisdom is finding joy in bewilderment
When you walk, you make an echo where they used to be.
This body is dying. I can feel it rotting all around me.
There's a line in the Bible about perfect love casting out fear. That I don't know about, but orneriness will do it every time.
There is an old saying that there is no country as unhappy as one that need heroes.(King Pelles the Sure)
Tell you something, the raven said. I was flying over the Midwest once. He stopped abruptly, closed his eyes for a moment, opened them, and began again. I was flying over the Midwest. Iowa or Illinois...
I'll tell you something. Once I was very fond of a poem by Emily Dickinson or somebody. I only remember one line of it, but it goes, 'The soul selects her own society.' I used to tell it to everybody....
I believe myself to be good, he thought, and so I can afford to titillate myself by considering evil, like a child frightening himself with horror stories. I am not a bad man. But I am not a wise one,...
I am afraid! It is not starving I fear, or talking to people, or even being alone. But I cannot bear to be useless and ineffectual. There must be some meaning to me, if not to my life; there must sure...
Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed. It is all part of the fairy tale.
Any woman can weep without tears, she answered over her shoulder, and most can heal with their hands. It depends on the wound. She is a woman, Your Highness, and that's riddle enough
The enchantment of error that you put on me I must wear forever in your eyes. We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream. Still
Traditionally, people are always supposed to feel empty, devastated, when a god leaves them. Nobody seems to wonder how the god might feel. Leaving the only people who almost understood.
There it is: that invisible boundary between conscious and not, between reality and fantasy, between here (whatever here is) and there (whatever there might be), between the seen and the seen’s true n...
Men have to have heroes, but no man can ever be as big as the need, and so a legend grows around a grain of truth, like a pearl.
It's really not so good to have time. Rush, scramble, desperation, this missed, that left behind, those others too big to fit into such a small space--that's the way life was meant to be. You're suppo...