Sometimes the bravest thing in the world was to sit through the night and feel the cold in your bones.
In a way I wanted to stop myself. It was cruel, I knew that, but right and wrong were somewhere else.
I have tried, of course, to be faithful to the evidence. Yet evidence is not truth. It is only evident.
Her white skin and those dark brown eyes and the way she always smiled at the world - always, it seemed - as if her face had been designed that way. The smile never went away.
He believed in mission. But . . . he did not believe in it as an intellectual imperative, or even as a professional standard. Mission . . . was an abstract notion that took meaning in concrete situati...
Do we choose sleep? Hell no and bullshit - we fall. We give ourselves over to possibility, to whim and fancy, to the bed, to the pillow, the tiny white tablet. And these choose for us.
I know what it is to feel unloved, to want revenge, to make mistakes, to suffer disappointment, yet also to find the courage to go forward in life.
In the summer of 1954, after several years in Austin, Minnesota, our family moved across the state to the small, rural town of Worthington, where my dad became regional manager for a life insurance co...
If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth.
He wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.
Мы живем в наших душах как в неизведанных странах, расчистив себе для обитания лишь по маленькой площадке; в душе ближнего мы знаем лишь полоску вдоль нашей с ним границы.Эдит Уортон. «Пробный камень»
People who were so incredibly alive could get so incredibly dead.
Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.
When a man died, there had to be blame. Jimmy Cross understood this. You could blame the war, You could blame the idiots who made the war. You could blame Kiowa for going to it. You could blame the ra...
What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.'Daddy,...
What is love, for God's sake, if not the most distilled obsession?
To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true.
Psychology—that was one thing I knew. You don't try to scare people in broad daylight. You wait. Because the darkness squeezes you inside yourself, you get cut off from the outside world, the imaginat...
Hear that quiet, man?' he said. 'That quiet - just listen. There's your moral.
But this, too, was a performance.