Joy, it is, which I’ve never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self – delight in something external, not satisfaction of some in...
Katherine Anne [Porter] treated them like favored nephews; she even cooked meals for them. Unfortunately, however, beneath Christopher’s deference and flattery, there was a steadily growing aggression...
(n.) Alt. of Memoirs
Now that young girls like my twelve-year-old friend Mai are being exposed to modern Western women like me through crowds of tourists, they're experiencing those first critical moments of cultural hesi...
Oh my!! How you've grown. Soon you'll be catching the Lord's balls.
Psychologists suggest that we must reach back at least three generations to look for clues whenever we begin untangling the emotional legacy of any one family's history.
Reading wasn't an attempt to educate myself. It was my chief escape from a world that, although gorgeous in landscape and rich with mountain culture, didn't provide what I needed—the promise of advent...
Standing in the shower, I feel something on the back of my leg that turns out to be my ass.
Suicide is a form of murder— premeditated murder. It isn’t something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes some getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A...
That is what War is, I thought: two ships pass each other, and nobody waves his hand.
The Buddha taught that most problems - if only you give them enough time and space - will eventually wear themselves out.
The head can travel a far piece while the body sits in one spot. It can traverse many decades, and many conversations can be had, even with the dead.
The interior life expands and fills; it approaches the edge of skin; it thickens with its own vivid story; it even begins to hear rumors, from beyond the horizon skin’s rim, of nations and wars. You w...
The philosopher Odo Marquard has noted a correlation in the German language between the word zwei, which means 'two,' and the word zweifel, which means 'doubt' - suggesting that two of anything brings...
The thought of killing myself had slowed me down to five miles per hour. The thought of killing someone else stopped me completely.
There is, of course, always the personal satisfaction of writing down one's own experiences so they may be saved, caught and pinned under glass, hoarded against the winter of forgetfulness. Time has b...
There was no better path to autonomy for an ambitious young businesswoman than to be married off to a respectable corpse.
This sound, which like all music--indeed, like all pleasure--I had been numbly unresponsive to for months, pierced my heart like a dagger, and in a flood of swift recollection I thought of all the joy...
Tomorrow! How sweet its prospects for a drunkard the night before. There is no better word. Before the earth hurls itself into sunshine, nothing is not possible.
We mask our needs as the needs of others.
Well, did anything interesting happen today?' [my father] would begin. And even before the daily question was completed I had eagerly launched into my narrative of every play, and almost every pitch,...
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