But I do like churches. The way it feels inside. It feels good when you just sit there, like you're in a forest and everything's really quiet, except there's still this sound you can't hear.
The presence of danger has a way of making you feel fully awake.
Whenever he told the story, Rat had a tendency to stop now and then, interrupting the flow, inserting little clarifications or bits of analysis and personal opinion. It was a bad habit, Mitchell Sande...
They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge un...
It was boredom with a twist, the kind of boredom that caused stomach disorders. (p 34 Spin)
We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, t...
My whole life seemed to spill out into the river, swirling away from me, everything I had ever been or ever wanted to be.
Nostalgia-- that's the basic sickness, and I never heard of a doctor who can cure it.
There it is, they'd say. Over and over—there it is, my friend, there it is—as if the repetition itself were an act of poise, a balance between crazyand almost crazy, knowing without going, there it is...
Stories can encourage us and embolden us to face ourselves and to feel. Stories can make us feel less alone. If we're reading a story that moves us, we can feel that emotion that I feel towards my fat...
The wars don't end when you sign peace treaties or when the years go by. They will echo on until I'm gone and all the widows and orphans are gone.
The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.
Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishon...
Love, as wonderful and horrible as it is, has at its center a kind of pitiful humor.
I suppose if we gain anything from this unsought experience it will be an appreciation for honesty- frankness on the part of our politicians, our friends, our loves, ourselves. No more liars in public...
I learned that moral courage is harder than physical courage.
A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.
That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.
You learn, finally, that you'll die, and so you try to hang on to your own life, that gentle, naive kid you used to be, but then after a while the sentiment takes over, and the sadness, because you kn...
What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end...