Flesh Novel Quotes

Ah, that shows you the power of music, that magician of magician, who lifts his wand and says his mysterious word and all things real pass away and the phantoms of your mind walk before you clothed in flesh.

The title is Ulysses' 'Is it about the Odyssey?' 'No, it’s about how prosaic life is today.' 'And so?' 'That’s all. It says that our heads are full of nonsense. That we are flesh, blood, and bone. That one person has the same value as another. That we want only to eat, drink, fuck.

Real life is unbelievable. Souls are snatched away from us, flesh and blood turn to dust, people you love betray you, men go to war over nothing. It’s all preposterous. That’s why we have novels. To make sense of things.

The soul, they say, is divine and the flesh is iniquity. But I am a musician and I ask this - without the wood and the strings of the violin, where would the sonata find form?

What a fuss for a name: famous or not, it's only a ribbon tied around a sack randomly filled with blood, flesh, words, shit, and petty thoughts.

He reached out to touch her cool flesh…bright flashes of heated fear soared through him as if his soul was dipped in the boiling liquids of purgatory.

Just as the bones, flesh, intestines and blood vessels are enclosed in a skin that makes the sight of man endurable, so the agitations and passions of the soul are enveloped in vanity; it is the skin of the soul.

Sexual desire is only the frustrated desire to eat human flesh.

...he could feel hot tears coming to his eyes as the image of that night, outside the house as the November wind blew black leaves up off the ground and the sky turned colors like bruised flesh.

But I am not the heroine of a novel. I am flesh, blood—interesting enough on occasion, with dull edges here and there, living a life of the expected and the unexpected, the wanted and the worst of the unwanted.

My name is Earwig Dungeon. I come from Wichita, Kansas. My mom and I used to own a restaurant where we served human flesh. It was very popular. We were millionaires. I had a pony and a yacht. Now we are on the run from the FBI…

One of my constant preoccupations is trying to understand how it is that other people exist, how it is that there are souls other than mine and consciousnesses not my own, which, because it is a consciousness, seems to me unique. I understand perfectly that the man before me uttering words similar to mine and making the same gestures I make, or could make, is in some way my fellow creature. However, I feel just the same about the people in illustrations I dream up, about the characters I see in novels or the dramatis personae on the stage who speak through the actors representing them. I suppose no one truly admits the existence of another person. One might concede that the other person is alive and feels and thinks like oneself, but there will always be an element of difference, a perceptible discrepancy, that one cannot quite put one's finger on. There are figures from times past, fantasy-images in books that seem more real to us than these specimens of indifference-made-flesh who speak to us across the counters of bars, or catch our eye in trams, or brush past us in the empty randomness of the streets. The others are just part of the landscape for us, usually the invisible landscape of the familiar. I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I've seen in engravings, that with many supposedly real people, with that metaphysical absurdity known as 'flesh and blood'. In fact 'flesh and blood' describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid on the butcher's marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive, the sirloin steaks and cutlets of Fate. I'm not ashamed to feel this way because I know it's how everyone feels. The lack of respect between men, the indifference that allows them to kill others without compunction (as murderers do) or without thinking (as soldiers do), comes from the fact that no one pays due attention to the apparently abstruse idea that other people have souls too.

No boy can resist being fed well by a good-natured and still handsome woman. Boys are very like nice dogs in this respect — give them a bone and they will like you at once.

it is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our lives and the lives of those who spring from us.

Novelists when they write novels tend to take an almost godlike attitude toward their subject, pretending to a total comprehension of the story, a man's life, which they can therefore recount as God Himself might, nothing standing between them and the naked truth, the entire story meaningful in every detail. I am as little able to do this as the novelist is, even though my story is more important to me than any novelist's is to him - for this is my story; it is the story of a man, not of an invented, or possible, or idealized, or otherwise absent figure, but of a unique being of flesh and blood, Yet, what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before, and men - each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature - are therefore shot wholesale nowadays. If we were not something more than unique human beings, if each one of us could really be done away with once and for all by a single bullet, storytelling would lose all purpose. But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.

The hour of spring was dark at last, sensuous memories of sunlight past, I stood alone in garden bowers and asked the value of my hours. Time was spent or time was tossed, Life was loved and life was lost. I kissed the flesh of tender girls, I heard the songs of vernal birds. I gazed upon the blushing light, aware of day before the night. So let me ask and hear a thought: Did I live the spring I’d sought? It's true in joy, I walked along, took part in dance, and sang the song. and never tried to bind an hour to my borrowed garden bower; nor did I once entreat a day to slumber at my feet. Yet days aren't lulled by lyric song, like morning birds they pass along, o'er crests of trees, to none belong; o'er crests of trees of drying dew, their larking flight, my hands, eschew Thus I’ll say it once and true... From all that I saw, and everywhere I wandered, I learned that time cannot be spent, It only can be squandered.

she delighted in being of the same substance as them, and in knowing that when she died her flesh would nourish other lives as they had nourished her.

boy can resist being fed well by a good-natured and still handsome woman. Boys are very like nice dogs in this respect — give them a bone and they will like you at once.

Boys and young men are violent in their affections, but they are seldom very constant;

Let it suffice that George Pontifex did not consider himself fortunate, and he who does not consider himself fortunate is unfortunate.

All young ladies are either very pretty or very clever or very sweet; they may take their choice as to which category they will go in for, but go in for one of the three they must.

Embryo minds, like embryo bodies, pass through a number of strange metamorphoses before they adopt their final shape.

They held each other tight and cried, while a dozen infected took turns tearing into their warm flesh.

Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime.

If it was not such an awful thing to say of anyone, I should say that she meant well.

There are two classes of people in this world, those who sin, and those who are sinned against; if a man must belong to either, he had better belong to the first than to the second.

Upon patterned cushions that might have been honked, zig by zag, out of Ornette Coleman’s horn, the odalisque exposed her flesh to a society that had grown frightened again of flesh.

Every moment of our existence is linked by a peculiar triple thread to our past—the most recent and the most distant—by memory. Our present swarms with traces of our past. We are histories of ourselves, narratives. I am not this momentary mass of flesh reclined on the sofa typing the letter a on my laptop; I am my thoughts full of the traces of the phrases that I am writing; I am my mother’s caresses, and the serene kindness with which my father calmly guided me; I am my adolescent travels; I am what my reading has deposited in layers in my mind; I am my loves, my moments of despair, my friendships, what I’ve written, what I’ve heard; the faces engraved on my memory. I am, above all, the one who a minute ago made a cup of tea for himself. The one who a moment ago typed the word “memory” into his computer. The one who just composed the sentence that I am now completing. If all this disappeared, would I still exist? I am this long, ongoing novel. My life consists of it.

Especially at night she was afraid of waking up and finding him formless in the bed, transformed into excrescences that burst out because of too much fluid, the flesh melted and dripping, and with it everything around, the furniture, the entire apartment and she herself, his wife, broken, sucked into that stream polluted by living matter.

Chuuya… Can I…ask you…a favor? […] Live. There is no longer…any way of knowing…who you are or where you came from. But even if…you are but a pattern…etched on the surface of raw power…you are you. Nothing changes that…because all people, all humanity…their brains and flesh…are nothing more than patterns—beautiful patterns…upon the material world…

Eh, she said once, what a fuss for a name: famous or not, it’s only a ribbon tied around a sack randomly filled with blood, flesh, words, shit, and petty thoughts. She mocked me at length on that point: I untie the ribbon—Elena Greco—and the sack stays there, it functions just the same, haphazardly, of course, without virtues or vices, until it breaks.

Some literary recommendations: James Salter’s erotic masterpiece, A Sport and a Pastime; Anais Nin’s collections of short stories Delta of Venus and Little Birds; the erotic novels Emanuelle by Emanuelle Arsan and Story of O by Pauline Réage; Harold Brodkey’s sexual saga “Innocence”—perhaps the greatest depiction of a session of cunnilingus ever penned; novels by Jerzy Kosinski such as Passion Play and Cockpit; Henry Miller’s Under the Roofs of Paris and Quiet Days in Clichy; My Secret Life by Anonymous and The Pure and the Impure by Colette; Nancy Friday’s anthology of fantasies, Secret Garden (filled with the correspondence of real people’s fantasies); stories from The Mammoth Book of Erotica or one of the many erotic anthologies edited by Susie Bright. For those with a taste for poetry, try Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil) by Charles Baudelaire or Flesh Unlimited by Guillaume Apollinaire. And for those who like comic books (kinky ones, that is), try the extra-hot works of writer/illustrator Eric Stanton, who specializes in female-domination fantasies.

When our poor, faultily sensitive vision can perceive a thing, we say that it is visible. When the nerves of touch can feel it, we say that it is tangible. Yet I tell you there are beings intangible to our physical sense, yet whose presence is felt by the spirit, and invisible to our eyes merely because those organs are not attuned to the light as reflected from their bodies. But light passed through the screen, which we are about to use has a wavelength novel to the scientific world, and by it you shall see with the eyes of the flesh that which has been invisible since life began. Have no fear! ("Unseen - Unfeared")

What did I care anymore about his political opinions, about Pasquale and Nadia, about the death of Ulrike Meinhof, the birth of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the electoral advances of the Communist Party? The world had retreated. I felt sunk inside myself, inside my flesh, which seemed to me not only the sole dwelling possible but also the only material for which it was worthwhile to struggle.

My conception of a novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct and total engagement with the author's story of his or her own life. This conception, again, I take from Kafka, who, although he was never transformed into an insect, and although he never had a piece of food (an apple from his family's table!) lodged in his flesh and rotting there, devoted his whole life as a writer to describing his personal struggle with his family, with women, with moral law, with his Jewish heritage, with his Unconscious, with his sense of guilt, and with the modern world. Kafka's work, which grows out of the nighttime dreamworld in Kafka's brain, is *more* autobiographical than any realistic retelling of his daytime experiences at the office or with his family or with a prostitute could have been. What is fiction, after all, if not a kind of purposeful dreaming? The writer works to create a dream that is vivid and has meaning, so that the reader can then vividly dream it and experience meaning. And work like Kafka's, which seems to proceed directly from dream, is therefore an exceptionally pure form of autobiography. There's an important paradox here that I would like to stress: the greater the autobiographical content of a fiction writer's work, the *smaller* its superficial resemblance to the writer's actual life. The deeper the writer digs for meaning, the more the random particulars of the writer's life become *impediments* to deliberate dreaming.

Joy. The joy of my joy. There through everything. A shocking sense of vitality and beauty present in both happiness and in the midst of pain. The only thing I can think to compare this experience to is the experience of an excellent story—reading a great novel, say, or watching a great movie. The scene before you might be a happy one or a sad one. You might feel uplifted or you might feel heartbroken or you might feel afraid. But whatever you feel, you’re still loving the story. Through prayer, I came to experience both pleasure and sorrow in something like that way. In God, the life of the flesh became the story of the spirit. I loved that story, no matter what. During

It is hard enough to know whether one is happy or unhappy now, and still harder to compare the relative happiness or unhappiness of different times of one’s life; the utmost that can be said is that we are fairly happy so long as we are not distinctly aware of being miserable.

Not to waste the spring I threw down everything, And ran into the open world To sing what I could sing... To dance what I could dance! And join with everyone! I wandered with a reckless heart beneath the newborn sun. First stepping through the blushing dawn, I crossed beneath a garden bower, counting every hermit thrush, counting every hour. When morning's light was ripe at last, I stumbled on with reckless feet; and found two nymphs engaged in play, approaching them stirred no retreat. With naked skin, their weaving hands, in form akin to Calliope's maids, shook winter currents from their hair to weave within them vernal braids. I grabbed the first, who seemed the stronger by her soft and dewy leg, and swore blind eyes, Lest I find I, before Diana, a hunted stag. But the nymphs they laughed, and shook their heads. and begged I drop beseeching hands. For one was no goddess, the other no huntress, merely two girls at play in the early day. "Please come to us, with unblinded eyes, and raise your ready lips. We will wash your mouth with watery sighs, weave you springtime with our fingertips." So the nymphs they spoke, we kissed and laid, by noontime's hour, our love was made, Like braided chains of crocus stems, We lay entwined, I laid with them, Our breath, one glassy, tideless sea, Our bodies draping wearily. We slept, I slept so lucidly, with hopes to stay this memory. I woke in dusty afternoon, Alone, the nymphs had left too soon, I searched where perched upon my knees Heard only larks' songs in the trees. "Be you, the larks, my far-flung maids? With lilac feet and branchlike braids... Who sing sweet odes to my elation, in your larking exaltation!" With these, my clumsy, carefree words, The birds they stirred and flew away, "Be I, poor Actaeon," I cried, "Be dead… Before they, like Hippodamia, be gone astray!" Yet these words, too late, remained unheard, By lark, that parting, morning bird. I looked upon its parting flight, and smelled the coming of the night; desirous, I gazed upon its jaunt, as Leander gazes Hellespont. Now the hour was ripe and dark, sensuous memories of sunlight past, I stood alone in garden bowers and asked the value of my hours. Time was spent or time was tossed, Life was loved and life was lost. I kissed the flesh of tender girls, I heard the songs of vernal birds. I gazed upon the blushing light, aware of day before the night. So let me ask and hear a thought: Did I live the spring I’d sought? It's true in joy, I walked along, took part in dance, and sang the song. and never tried to bind an hour to my borrowed garden bower; nor did I once entreat a day to slumber at my feet. Yet days aren't lulled by lyric song, like morning birds they pass along, o'er crests of trees, to none belong; o'er crests of trees of drying dew, their larking flight, my hands, eschew Thus I'll say it once and true… From all that I saw, and everywhere I wandered, I learned that time cannot be spent, It only can be squandered.

He says nothing, vehemently. I falter away and we sit, mutually staring into the fouled water. ... With time to kill, I ponder dismally the possible derivation of the zombie myth from people like my boyfriend. I picture Ralph blackened, semi-fingered, with bright bone peeking through his flesh. The odd small worm clings, festively wiggling. In my image, Ralph's really upset about decaying, and I feel for him sorrowfully. I want to tell him I would still love him, if he were decomposed. Of course in practice there is no predicting what I'd feel, and besides which, it's a wild associative leap. I ponder dismally how I've alienated people, all my life, with my bizarre associative leaps.

the baby must be either a boy or girl — this much, at any rate, was clear.

Better to parry the sword than heal the wound it made in the flesh.

Mmm,” Dirgeos hummed. “Allow yourself to give over to the sway of the galaxy, the endless circuitry and slow decline of flesh amid it. Give over.

Erect, it had been more impressive, a novel juxtaposition of hard and soft, with its glove of silky skin that slid against the stiff, veined flesh underneath.

They were pretending to be a mother and father with their baby, but it wasn’t peaceful: they were pretending to have a fight. I stopped. Dede instructed Mirko: You have to hit me, understand? The new living flesh was replicating the old in a game, we were a chain of shadows who had always been on the stage with the same burden of love, hatred, desire, and violence.

People buy pathetic substitutes for community—sound waves in a speaker, particles bombarding a screen—all pretending to be friends or the folks next door. The vacuum they leave when the screen goes dark, when the recording ends, is filled with a loneliness worse than ever before.” “What’s the answer?” “Flesh and blood touching flesh and blood. Life touching life. Yours, mine, everybody’s.

her five favorite novels: Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Richard Hughes’s High Wind in Jamaica, and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

It’s not just my body. I’m cold inside. Not disciplined properly. That’s what it is. I still long to cling to warm flesh, like a baby, and I give in too quickly to sentimentality. Because I’m alone, I feel sorry for myself and envy people who have nice warm houses. At heart, I’m base and mean! Why can’t I be thankful for independence and freedom to go where I choose? Why can’t I hold on to my ideals and my pride?

The flames of hell may scorch the flesh, but the whispers of devils will sear the soul. They are temptation and sin. They are desire and despair. Be careful where you seek answers. Not all costs are worth paying.

a good deal of unkindness and selfishness on the part of parents towards children is not generally followed by ill consequences to the parents themselves. They may cast a gloom over their children’s lives for many years without having to suffer anything that will hurt them. I should say, then, that it shows no great moral obliquity on the part of parents if within certain limits they make their children’s lives a burden to them.

One night, alone in her Dogtown bed, Judy finally admitted to herself that she had been in love with Cornelius. "In love" precisely as it was described in the novels and poems she had read with Martha; love as a kind of sweet madness that colored everything. Judy had been shocked that strangers across the ocean could describe the workings of her Yankee heart: the preoccupation and yearning, the soaring happiness and keen appreciation of a man's hidden qualities, the sublime meeting of souls. And yet, there was never a mention of the sort of union she'd shared with Cornelius, the longing and fulfillment of the flesh, that could transform two bodies into one.

It's one thing to be helpless as one tries to lace a corset or to mount an elephant, quite another to be helpless as a bandit pushes a black steel knife against the flesh of your throat while his brother comes to join him.

If you think I am wrong, I am wrong for all the right reasons. Dealing with death on a regular basis makes you shallow inside. Your soul sleeps inside your chest, pleading to be woken up. In those dark times in a battle, one bad moment, a step on a mine, a bullet on target, or a lethal explosion, and you are a dismembered lifeless memory. Your dead flesh lays on the hot sand which burns your bare skin if you are unlucky enough not to be numb.

A man’s friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage — but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends. The rift in friendship which invariably makes its appearance on the marriage of either of the parties to it was fast widening, as it no less invariably does, into the great gulf which is fixed between the married and the unmarried, and I was beginning to leave my protege to a fate with which I had neither right nor power to meddle.

That people, even more than things, lost their boundaries and overflowed into shapelessness is what most frightened Lila in the course of her life. The loss of those boundaries in her brother, whom she loved more than anyone in her family, had frightened her, and the disintegration of Stefano in the passage from fiancé to husband terrified her. I learned only from her notebooks how much her wedding night had scarred her and how she feared the potential distortion of her husband’s body, his disfigurement by the internal impulses of desire and rage or, on the contrary, of subtle plans, base acts. Especially at night she was afraid of waking up and finding him formless in the bed, transformed into excrescences that burst out because of too much fluid, the flesh melted and dripping, and with it everything around, the furniture, the entire apartment and she herself, his wife, broken, sucked into that stream polluted by living matter.

certain kind of good fortune generally attends self-made men to the last. It is their children of the first, or first and second, generation who are in greater danger, for the race can no more repeat its most successful performances suddenly and without its ebbings and flowings of success than the individual can do so, and the more brilliant the success in any one generation, the greater as a general rule the subsequent exhaustion until time has been allowed for recovery.

You have always been my only muse. I cannot paint or sculpt. I have only my words to render your likeness. Sometimes I wish I were both God and Adam so I could tear out my rib and create you from my own flesh. I would say I’d create you from my heart, but I gave that to you when you left me. But that’s a cliché, isn’t it? Sadly, that’s all I have these days. The whole story is a cliché. I desired you. I ate of you. I lost you. That ancient story – older than the Garden, old as the Snake. I would have liked to call this story of ours The Temptation but the word temptation, once the province of pious theologians, has now been co-opted by every third second-rate romance novelist. And although I loved you, my beautiful girl, this is not a romance novel.

Do you not despair?” cried I, exasperated at his coolness. “No,” replied he firmly. “What! you shall believe we have a chance?” “Yes, a thousand time, yes! While the heart beats and the flesh palpitates, a creature endowed with will should never give place to despair.

Nobody ever thinks it will happen,” Sarah replied. “Real life is unbelievable. Souls are snatched away from us, flesh and blood turn to dust, people you love betray you, men go to war over nothing. It’s all preposterous. That’s why we have novels. To make sense of things.

Christopher, leaving his tea untouched, faced the two old men. He supposed they might be sixty, but it was impossible to tell with Asians; one year they were fresh with youth, and the next their skulls came through their flesh as if their corpses were eager to escape into the grave.

He did not know if he believed in the Holy Spirit, but if asked he would have said that night was the closest he came, that there was an otherness, a largeness apparent and invisible there at the same time, something that did not exist in the textbooks but was the same thing that had been since the beginning, which was that there was something more than the perimeter of flesh, something else and beyond explanation, and which was felt in that part of us that, for lack of any better, was given the word soul. In the growing warmth of the congregation at Communion, the

10 / Sgoráya négoy i toskóy : Both nouns belong to the vaguely evocative type of romantic locution so frequent in Eugene Onegin and so difficult to render by exact English words. Nega ranges from “mollitude” (Fr. mollesse) , i.e., soft luxuriance, “dulcitude,” through various shades of amorous pensiveness, douce paresse, and sensual tenderness to outright voluptuousness (Fr. volupté). The translator has to be careful here not to overdo in English what Pushkin is on the point of doing in the Russian when he makes his maiden burn with all the French languors of flesh and fancy.

In truth, I bear the fault alone, for a writer longs to see his words come to life, especially as a playwright to see the characters you create in your mind come to flesh and blood on the stage. What delight strokes the vanity of a writer to hear the swoons of the penny-stinkers clamorng at your feet and calling your name.

In truth, I bear the fault alone, for a writer longs to see his words come to life, especially as a playwright to see the characters you create in your mind come to flesh and blood on the stage. What delight strokes the vanity of a writer to hear the swoons of the penny-stinkers clamoring at your feet and calling your name.

It is hopeless, I cannot say it. I give a little whooping cough and raise my eyes to his face. I cannot help myself, I hate him like an enemy, I cannot stop myself dreaming of his enemy, I cannot say his name, I cannot possibly marry him. But Henry, prosaic and real, understands exactly what is happening, and gives me a sharp corrective pinch with his fingers in the soft palm of my hand. He uses his nails, he digs into my flesh, I yelp at the pain, and his hard brown gaze emerges from the mist and I see his scowl. I snatch at a gasp of air. “Say it!” he mutters furiously. I master myself and say again, correctly this time, “I, Elizabeth, take thee, Henry . . .

When Michael Frere came to see Elizabeth about her autobiography All the Dogs of My Life she found him ‘such a boring little man. But it is because we are all growing old, and the bones of our inadequate minds come through the flesh that hid them.’ She hadn’t always found him boring, and Love, one of her best novels, is largely based on their romance.

Though a prose writer (of over fifty novels and a journalist and memoirist of forty books of nonfiction), Colette (1873–1954) lives on in literary history as the poet of the flesh—male, female, androgynous, young, aging, old, animal, vegetable. Proust, who praised her “voluptuous and bitter” soul, wept over some of her pages, André Gide “devoured [her] at a gulp.

Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you' Do you think I am an automation?-a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, an little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!-I have as much soul as you,-and full of as much heart! And if G-d had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, a it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium o custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at G-d's feet, equal,-as we are!

But from what are we escaping by means of the novel? From a reality we consider too overwhelming? Happy people read novels, too, and it is an established fact that extreme suffering takes away the taste for reading. From another angle, the romantic universe of the novel certainly has less substance than the other universe where people of flesh and blood harass us without respite.

Even they were frightened, not at the boy’s terrible words, but at his terrible audacity. It did not seem possible that any living creature could thus beard Wolf Larsen in his teeth. I know for myself that I was shocked into admiration of the boy, and I saw in him the splendid invincibleness of immortality rising above the flesh and the fears of the flesh, as in the prophets of old, to condemn unrighteousness.

In the novel All Flesh Is Grass, one of Cliff’s characters, Nancy, who was a writer herself, would say of that profession: “It’s a thing you don’t talk about—not until you’re well along with it. There are so many things that can go wrong with writing. I don’t want to be one of those pseudo-literary people who are always writing something they never finish, or talking about writing something that they never start.

I tell you I must go!’ I retorted, roused to something like passion. ‘Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton? – a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! – I have as much soul as you – and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh; – it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal – as we are!

Wraeththu have been with me for the greater part of my life. My first rather ham-fisted (and half-finished) stories about them began in my mid-teens. It wasn't until I was twenty-six that I began work properly on the full-length novel that became The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit, first volume of the Wraeththu trilogy, which was published in 1987. This was followed by The Bewitchments of Love and Hate and the Fulfilments of Fate and Desire.

They dressed her and she laced tightly so that her breasts were pressed into two tantalizing curves of creamy flesh at the neck of her gown. Her glossy black hair was exposed by her pushed-back hood, her long fingers were loaded with rings, she wore her favorite pearl choker with the “B” for Boleyn at her throat, and she paused before she left the room to look at herself in the mirror, and shot her reflection that knowing, seductive little half-smile.

Some days since: a singular mood came over me: one in which grief replaced frenzy-sorrow, sullenness. I longed for thee! I longed for thee both with soul and flesh! I asked of G-d, at once in anguish and humility, if I had not been long enough desolate, afflicted, tormented; and might not soon taste bliss and peace once more. That I merited all I endured, I pleaded; and the alpha and omega of my heart's wishes broke involuntarily from my lips in the words- "Jane! Jane! Jane!

In recent years I had begun to be interested in fashion. But sometimes—especially when I had dressed not only to make a good impression in general but for a man—preparing myself (this was the word) seemed to me to have something ridiculous about it. All that struggle, all that time spent camouflaging myself when I could be doing something else. The colors that suited me, the ones that didn’t, the styles that made me look thinner, those that made me fatter, the cut that flattered me, the one that didn’t. A lengthy, costly preparation. Reducing myself to a table set for the sexual appetite of the male, to a well-cooked dish to make his mouth water. And then the anguish of not succeeding, of not seeming pretty, of not managing to conceal with skill the vulgarity of the flesh with its moods and odors and imperfections. But I had done it. I had done it also for Nino, recently. I had wanted to show him that I was different. But now, enough. He had brought his wife and it seemed to me a mean thing. I hated competing in looks with another woman, especially under the gaze of a man, and I suffered at the thought of finding myself in the same place with the beautiful girl I had seen in the photograph, it made me sick to my stomach. She would size me up, study every detail with the pride of a woman of Via Tasso taught since birth to attend to her body; then, at the end of the evening, alone with her husband, she would criticize me with cruel lucidity.

Anger had always been a secondary emotion anyway. That’s what her mother had once told her, that fury rode on a fast horse charging through a relationship, trampling right over loss, disappointment, and grief. And if one wasn’t careful, wrath crushed love too. “Pay attention to those forgotten feelings when you lose your temper, Jenny. Those are the trio of emotions that if not recognized and dealt with, will surely bring a soul down and make ire the driving force in your days. Wounds must grow new flesh.

He did not know if he believed in the Holy Spirit, but if asked he would have said that night was the closest he came, that there was an otherness, a largeness apparent and invisible there at the same time, something that did not exist in the textbooks but was the same thing that had been since the beginning, which was that there was something more than the perimeter of flesh, something else and beyond explanation, and which was felt in that part of us that, for lack of any better, was given the word soul.

He “had gone through life with one skin fewer than most men,” the novelist Eric Malpass writes of his quiet and cerebral protagonist, also an author, in the novel The Long Long Dances. “The troubles of others moved him more, as did also the teeming beauty of life: moved him, compelled him, to seize a pen and write about them. [He was moved by] walking in the hills, listening to a Schubert impromptu, watching nightly from his armchair the smashing of bone and flesh that made up so much of the nine o’clock news.

With his own hands, Chu Xun ripped open the gash in his chest, dug into his flesh, and grabbed his no-longer beating heart. Slowly, inch by inch, he tore it out. Blood dripped from the heart, which was enveloped in a golden-red flame. It was Chu Xun’s spiritual core, the last flare of light from a candle that had burned out. “Take…it…” He lifted the flaming heart and held it out in front of him. “Take it…take…it…” Droplets of blood fell only to become so many red haitang blossoms, flaring brilliantly as they drifted downward.

Yes. Do you remember?” Once more a shrug of the shoulders. “How should I remember? We have questioned thousands—” “Questioned! Beaten into unconsciousness, kidneys crushed, bones broken, thrown into cellars like sacks, dragged up again, faces torn, testicles crushed—that was what you called questioning! The hot frightful moaning of those who were no longer able to cry—questioned! The whimpering between unconsciousness and consciousness, kicks in the belly, rubber clubs, whips—yes, all that you innocently called ‘questioning’!” “Don’t move your hands! Or I’ll shoot you down! Do you remember little Max Rosenberg who lay beside me in the cellar with his torn body and who tried to smash his head on the cement wall to keep from being questioned again—questioned, why? Because he was a democrat! And Willmann who passed blood and had no teeth and only one eye left after he had been questioned by you for two hours—questioned, why? Because he was a Catholic and did not believe your Fuehrer was the new Messiah. And Riesenfeld whose head and back looked like raw lumps of flesh and who implored us to bite open his arteries because he was toothless and no longer able to do it himself after he had been questioned by you—questioned, why? Because he was against war and did not believe that culture is most perfectly expressed by bombs and flame throwers. Questioned! Thousands have been questioned, yes—don’t move your hands, you swine! And now finally I’ve got you and we are driving to a house with thick walls and we will be all alone and I’ll question you—slowly, slowly, for days, the Rosenberg treatment

I think the Church Catechism has a good deal to do with the unhappy relations which commonly even now exist between parents and children. That work was written too exclusively from the parental point of view; the person who composed it did not get a few children to come in and help him; he was clearly not young himself, nor should I say it was the work of one who liked children — in spite of the words “my good child” which, if I remember rightly, are once put into the mouth of the catechist and, after all, carry a harsh sound with them.

The god of the prosperity gospelists is a pathetic doormat, a genie. The god of the cutesy coffee mugs and Joel Osteen tweets is a milquetoast doofus like the guys in the Austen novels you hope the girls don’t end up with, holding their hats limply in hand and minding their manners to follow your lead like a butler—or the doormat he stands on. The god of the American Dream is Santa Claus. The god of the open theists is not sovereignly omniscient, declaring the end from the beginning, but just a really good guesser playing the odds. The god of our therapeutic culture is ourselves, we, the “forgivers” of ourselves, navel-haloed morons with “baggage” but not sin. None of these pathetic gods could provoke fear and trembling. But the God of the Scriptures is a consuming fire (Deut. 4:24). “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb. 10:31). He stirs up the oceans with the tip of his finger, and they sizzle rolling clouds of steam into the sky. He shoots lightning from his fists. This is the God who leads his children by a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire. This is the God who makes war, sends plagues, and sits enthroned in majesty and glory in his heavens, doing what he pleases. This is the God who, in the flesh, turned tables over in the temple as if he owned the place. This Lord God Jesus Christ was pushed to the edge of the cliff and declared, “This is not happening today,” and walked right back through the crowd like a boss. This Lord says, “No one takes my life; I give it willingly,” as if to say, “You couldn’t kill me unless I let you.” This Lord calms the storms, casts out demons, binds and looses, and has the authority to grant us the ability to do the same. The Devil is this God’s lapdog. And it is this God who has summoned us, apprehended us, saved us. It is this God who has come humbly, meekly, lowly, pouring out his blood in infinite conquest to set the captives free, cancel the record of debt against us, conquer sin and Satan, and swallow up death forever. Let us, then, advance the gospel of the kingdom out into the perimeter of our hearts and lives with affectionate meekness and humble submission. Let us repent of our nonchalance. Let us embrace the wonder of Christ.

All that struggle, all that time spent camouflaging myself when I could be doing something else. The colors that suited me, the ones that didn't, the styles that made me look thinner, those that made me fatter, the cut that flattered me, the one that didn't. A lengthy, costly preparation. Reducing myself to a table set for the sexual appetite of the male, to a well-cooked dish to make his mouth water. And then the anguish of not seeming pretty, of not managing to conceal with skill the vulgarity of the flesh with its moods and odors and imperfections. But I had done it.

Some very eminent critics writing in the decades immediately after the novel's publication felt that Eliot failed to maintain sufficient critical distance in her depiction of Ladislaw--that she fell in love with her own creation in a way that shows a lack of artistic control and is even unseemly, like a hoary movie director whose lens lingers too long on the young flesh of a favored actress. Lord David Cecil calls Ladislaw 'a schoolgirl's dream, and a vulgar one at that,' while Leslie Stephen complained 'Ladislaw is almost obtrusively a favorite with his creator,' and depreciated him as 'an amiable Bohemian.

Am I a liar in your eyes?’ he asked passionately. ‘Little sceptic, you shall be convinced. What love have I for Miss Ingram? None: and that you know. What love has she for me? None: as I have taken pains to prove: I caused a rumour to reach her that my fortune was not a third of what was supposed, and after that I presented myself to see the result; it was coldness both from her and her mother. I would not – I could not – marry Miss Ingram. You – you strange, you almost unearthly thing! – I love you as my own flesh. You – poor and obscure, and small and plain as you are – I entreat to accept me as a husband.

Jasmine shook her head. She had forgotten about the tales of the Jinn that her father warned her about. Now, being here the memories were returning like a slow and purposeful spider. With its long, black legs the nightmares would creep into her mind each time she closed her eyes. Then, she would see through the creature’s murky eyes. She would see the carcass of a deer as it lay in the glistening white. She would watch the hyena tearing at its sweated flesh, blood seeping into the snow forming warm pools of death around her feet. And in that moment, the deer shifted. It shifted into the shape of a young boy.

January 15, 1995. Lately, words have been assailing me. Words like ashes, cocoyea brooms, sem, chataigne, roti, chunkaying, lepaying, washing wares. Everyday domestic words from long ago, a far-off time and place. Other words fly past me like spectres and they want something – words like gloaming, lovevine, lianas, pois-doux, zaboca, mango vere, pomme-cythere, Manzanilla, calypso, j’ouvert morning, ginga, carilee, googoonie, chuntah, calchul. Patois words and Hindi words. Words are ghosts, ancestors on this side. They are not symbols. They are alive and sensate – full of flesh and stone and jagged edges. Word jumbies.

On the day of the races at Krasnoe Selo, Vronsky had come earlier than usual to eat beefsteak in the common messroom of the regiment. He had no need to be strict with himself, as he had very quickly been brought down to the required light weight; but still he had to avoid gaining flesh, and so he eschewed farinaceous and sweet dishes. He sat with his coat unbuttoned over a white waistcoat, resting both elbows on the table, and while waiting for the steak he had ordered he looked at a French novel that lay open on his plate. He was only looking at the book to avoid conversation with the officers coming in and out; he was thinking.

In the silence, in the darkness of solitude, our thoughts become the monsters that torment us like little children in the night. I cannot tell myself this is a nightmare. O heaven high above me, how I wish…wish I were crazy, safe in some asylum, in a straightjacket…how I wish this were all made up like a terrible dream…all to be awoken from with the swallowing of a little red and green pill. But it is happening and no matter how hard I scratch and bite my flesh I will not wake up. Silence. Wer ist das? (The sound of breath, it takes me a minute to realize that it is mine own). Strange, but even then I do not know who that is.

This raises a novel question: which of the two is really important, intelligence or consciousness? As long as they went hand in hand, debating their relative value was just a pastime for philosophers. But in the twenty-first century, this is becoming an urgent political and economic issue. And it is sobering to realise that, at least for armies and corporations, the answer is straightforward: intelligence is mandatory but consciousness is optional. Armies and corporations cannot function without intelligent agents, but they don’t need consciousness and subjective experiences. The conscious experiences of a flesh-and-blood taxi driver are infinitely richer than those of a self-driving car, which feels absolutely nothing. The taxi driver can enjoy music while navigating the busy streets of Seoul. His mind may expand in awe as he looks up at the stars and contemplates the mysteries of the universe. His eyes may fill with tears of joy when he sees his baby girl taking her very first step. But the system doesn’t need all that from a taxi driver. All it really wants is to bring passengers from point A to point B as quickly, safely and cheaply as possible. And the autonomous car will soon be able to do that far better than a human driver, even though it cannot enjoy music or be awestruck by the magic of existence.

Many people approach Tolstoy with mixed feelings. They love the artist in him and are intensely bored by the preacher; but at the same time it is rather difficult to separate Tolstoy the preacher from Tolstoy the artist—it is the same deep slow voice, the same robust shoulder pushing up a cloud of visions or a load of ideas. What one would like to do, would be to kick the glorified soapbox from under his sandalled feet and then lock him up in a stone house on a desert island with gallons of ink and reams of paper—far away from the things, ethical and pedagogical, that diverted his attention from observing the way the dark hair curled above Anna's white neck. But the thing cannot be done : Tolstoy is homogeneous, is one, and the struggle which, especially in the later years, went on between the man who gloated over the beauty of black earth, white flesh, blue snow, green fields, purple thunderclouds, and the man who maintained that fiction is sinful and art immoral—this struggle was still confined within the same man. Whether painting or preaching, Tolstoy was striving, in spite of all obstacles, to get at the truth. As the author of Anna Karenin, he used one method of discovering truth; in his sermons, he used another; but somehow, no matter how subtle his art was and no matter how dull some of his other attitudes were, truth which he was ponderously groping for or magically finding just around the corner, was always the same truth — this truth was he and this he was an art. What troubles one, is merely that he did not always recognize his own self when confronted with truth. I like the story of his picking up a book one dreary day in his old age, many years after he had stopped writing novels, and starting to read in the middle, and getting interested and very much pleased, and then looking at the title—and seeing: Anna Karenin by Leo Tolstoy. What obsessed Tolstoy, what obscured his genius, what now distresses the good reader, was that, somehow, the process of seeking the Truth seemed more important to him than the easy, vivid, brilliant discovery of the illusion of truth through the medium of his artistic genius. Old Russian Truth was never a comfortable companion; it had a violent temper and a heavy tread. It was not simply truth, not merely everyday pravda but immortal istina—not truth but the inner light of truth. When Tolstoy did happen to find it in himself, in the splendor of his creative imagination, then, almost unconsciously, he was on the right path. What does his tussle with the ruling Greek-Catholic Church matter, what importance do his ethical opinions have, in the light of this or that imaginative passage in any of his novels? Essential truth, istina, is one of the few words in the Russian language that cannot be rhymed. It has no verbal mate, no verbal associations, it stands alone and aloof, with only a vague suggestion of the root "to stand" in the dark brilliancy of its immemorial rock. Most Russian writers have been tremendously interested in Truth's exact whereabouts and essential properties. To Pushkin it was of marble under a noble sun ; Dostoevski, a much inferior artist, saw it as a thing of blood and tears and hysterical and topical politics and sweat; and Chekhov kept a quizzical eye upon it, while seemingly engrossed in the hazy scenery all around. Tolstoy marched straight at it, head bent and fists clenched, and found the place where the cross had once stood, or found—the image of his own self.

To dismantle Christianity, one must defy thousands of years of hymns and candles, nativity sets, Madonnas and stained glass windows; prayers, lectures, movies and novels; speeches on battlefields, our Western worldview and the way we see ourselves as individuals. Christianity is a culture, both transcending and inextricably linked with Western culture. One does not simply disprove a culture. The only way to stop this train is to stop buying tickets. To do that, we need better modes of transportation and better destinations. Sherrie was the first to show me another spiritual country, accessible by starship or quantum teleporter—beautiful atheisms, formed when individuals embrace the wildness of an enigmatic, indifferent universe and dare to live compassionately.

For Gone Girl, I knew Nick and Amy had to be very believable, so I made ipod playlists for them, and knew their netflix queues. I wrote scenes of them in childhood from other people’s points of view: A scene of Amy in highschool, written from her friend’s POV, or Nicks kindergarten teacher writing about parent-teacher conference night. Stuff I knew I’d never use, but would help me flesh them out. I do that a lot when I’ve hit a writer’s block — it keeps me writing and sometimes helps solve a problem. Amy’s Cool Girl speech started as a writing exercise, but that one I liked so much I kept it for the book. Once I have a first draft, then the actual real work for me begins, because then I can see the novel as a whole and see what needs work. I do tons of rewriting; it’s where the book becomes a book.

They say there should be no crying out. They say what they had closed should not have been reopened. They say that's why they locked you up. They're right. I'm going to die of these words. I'm going to die of being closed in. I don't want to. It's too late. There should be no consent. But I'm not the one. I'm not the one who cries out. I'm not the one who writes. I'm another woman. She lives in my body. She doesn't have my horrid severed fingers. She loves the fields and the rivers. She loves the baskets and the cherries. She loves them so much that she wants to join them, be one with them. Her name is eternity. She's called memory. She's called death. She pursues me. She clings to me. She talks to me of former times. She talks to me of before. She settles down in me. She grows there. She invades my flesh. She takes my life.

She paused midway to look back. Standing there trembling in the water and not from the cold for there was none. Do not speak to her. Do not call. When she reached him he held out his hand and she took it. She was so pale in the lake she seemed to be burning. Like foxfire in a darkened wood. That burned cold. Like the moon that burned cold. Her black hair floating on the water about her, falling and floating on the water. She put her other arm about his shoulder and looked toward the moon in the west do not speak to her do not call and then she turned her face up to him. Sweeter for the larceny of time and flesh, sweeter for the betrayal. Nesting cranes that stood singlefooted among the cane on the south shore had pulled their slender beaks from their wingpits to watch. Me quieres? she said. Yes, he said. He said her name. God yes, he said.

God--I wrote, more or less--creates man, Ish, in his image. He creates a masculine and a feminine version. How? First, with the dust of the earth, he forms Ish, and blows into his nostrils the breath of life. Then he makes Isha'h, the woman, from the already formed male material, material no longer raw but living, which he takes from Ish's side, and immediately closes up the flesh. The result is that Ish can say: This thing is not, like the army of all that has been created, other than me, but is flesh of my flesh, bone of my bones. God produced it from me. He made me fertile with the breath of life and extracted it from my body. I am Ish and she is Isha'h. In the word above all, in the word that names her, she derives from me. I am in the image of the divine spirit. I carry within me his Word. She is therefore a pure suffix applied to by verbal root, she can express herself only within my word.

His father was in an unexpectedly soft mood on that night, when the moon swam in a cloudless sky over the begrimed shadows of the town. “You still believe in something, then?” he said in a clear voice, which had been growing feeble of late. “You believe in flesh and blood, perhaps? A full and equable contempt would soon do away with that, too. But since you have not attained to it, I advise you to cultivate that form of contempt which is called pity. It is perhaps the least difficult — always remembering that you, too, if you are anything, are as pitiful as the rest, yet never expecting any pity for yourself.” “What is one to do, then?” sighed the young man, regarding his father, rigid in the high-backed chair. “Look on — make no sound,” were the last words of the man who had spent his life in blowing blasts upon a terrible trumpet which filled heaven and earth with ruins, while mankind went on its way unheeding.

it occurred to him that he was nearly sixty years old and that he ought to be beyond the force of such passion, of such love. But he was not beyond it, he knew, and would never be. Beneath the numbness, the indifference, the removal, it was there, intense and steady; it had always been there. In his youth he had given it freely, without thought; he had given it to the knowledge that had been revealed to him--how many years ago?--by Archer Sloane; he had given it to Edith, in those first blind foolish days of his courtship and marriage; and he had given it to Katherine, as if it had never been given before. He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.

She put her hand on him, just under the left pectoral muscle, half patted, half slapped, half caressed. — This is what I believe in - flesh-and-blood people, no gods up in the sky or anywhere on the ground. ‘Development’ - one great big wonderful all-purpose god of a machine, eh, Superjuggernaut that’s going to make it all all right, put everything right if we just get the finance for it. The money and the know-how machine. Isn’t that it, with you? The politics are of no concern. The ideology doesn’t matter a damn. The poor devils don’t know what’s good for them, anyway. That’s how you justify what you condone - that’s what lets you off the hook, isn’t it - the Great Impartial. Development. No dirty hands or compromised minds. Neither dirty racist nor kaffir-boetie. Neither dirty Commie nor Capitalist pig. It’s all going to be decided by computer - look, no hands! Change is something programmed, not aspired to. No struggle between human beings. That’d be too smelly and too close. Let them eat cake, by all means - if production allows for it, and dividends are not affected, in time. —

Wallace had read the Tractatus, of course (he wrote to Lance Olsen that he thought its first sentence was "the most beautiful opening line in western lit"). He knew that Wittgenstein's book presented a spare and unforgiving picture of the relations among logic, language, and the physical world. He knew that the puzzles solved and raised by the book were influential, debatable, and rich in their implications. But as a flesh-and-blood reader with human feelings, he also knew, though he had never articulated it out loud, that as you labored to understand the Tractatus, its cold, formal, logical picture of the world cold make you feel strange, lonely, awestruck, lost, frightened-a range of moods not unlike those undergone by Kate herself. The similarities were not accidental. Markson's novel, as Wallace put it, was like a 240-page answer to the question, "What if somebody really had to live in a Tractatusized world?" Pronouncing the novel "a kind of philosophical sci-fi," Wallace explained that Markson had staged a human drama on an alien intellectual planet, and in so doing he had "fleshed the abstract sketches of Wittgenstein's doctrine into the concrete theater of human loneliness.

Jove! I feel as if nothing could ever touch me,” he said in a tone of sombre conviction. “If this business couldn’t knock me over, then there’s no fear of there being not enough time to — climb out, and...” He looked upwards. ‘It struck me that it is from such as he that the great army of waifs and strays is recruited, the army that marches down, down into all the gutters of the earth. As soon as he left my room, that “bit of shelter,” he would take his place in the ranks, and begin the journey towards the bottomless pit. I at least had no illusions; but it was I, too, who a moment ago had been so sure of the power of words, and now was afraid to speak, in the same way one dares not move for fear of losing a slippery hold. It is when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence; the envelope of flesh and blood on which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand, and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable, and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp.

It wanted but a little while of sunset, when the sailor and his young comrade had finished flensing the shark. The raft now exhibited quite an altered appearance. Between the two upright oars several pieces of rope had been stretched transversely, and from these hung suspended the broad thin flitches of the shark’s flesh, that at a distance might have been mistaken for some sort of a sail. Indeed, they acted as such; for their united discs presented a considerable breadth of surface to the breeze, which had sprung up as the evening approached, and the raft by this means moved through the water with considerable rapidity. There was no effort made to steer it. The idea of reaching land was entirely out of the question. Their only hope of salvation lay in their being seen from a ship; and as a ship was as likely to come from one direction as another, it mattered not to which of the thirty-two points of the compass their raft might be drifting. Yes, it did matter. So thought Ben Brace, on reflection. It might be of serious consequence, should the raft make way to the westward. Somewhere in that direction—how far neither could guess—that greater raft, with its crew of desperate ruffians,—those drunken would-be cannibals,—must be drifting about, like themselves, at the mercy of winds and waves: perhaps more than themselves suffering the dire extreme of thirst and hunger.

Under these circumstances the most anodyne book was a source of danger from the simple fact that love was alluded to, and woman depicted as an attractive creature; and this was enough to account for all—for the inherent ignorance of Catholics, since it was proclaimed as the preventive cure for temptations—for the instinctive horror of art, since to these craven souls every written and studied work was in its nature a vehicle of sin and an incitement to fall. Would it not really be far more sensible and judicious to open the windows, to air the rooms, to treat these souls as manly beings, to teach them not to be so much afraid of their own flesh, to inculcate the firmness and courage needed for resistance? For really it is rather like a dog which barks at your heels and snaps at your legs if you are afraid of him, but who beats a retreat if you turn on him boldly and drive him off. The fact remains that these schemes of education have resulted, on the one hand, in the triumph of the flesh in the greater number of men who have been thus brought up and then thrown into a worldly life, and on the other, in a wide diffusion of folly and fear, an abandonment of the possessions of the intellect and the capitulation of the Catholic army surrendering without a blow to the inroads of profane literature, which takes possession of territory that it has not even had the trouble of conquering. This really was madness! The Church had created art, had cherished it for centuries; and now by the effeteness of her sons she was cast into a corner. All the great movements of our day, one after the other—romanticism, naturalism—had been effected independently of her, or even against her will. If a book were not restricted to the simplest tales, or pleasing fiction ending in virtue rewarded and vice punished, that was enough; the propriety of beadledom was at once ready to bray. As soon as the most modern form of art, the most malleable and the broadest—the Novel—touched on scenes of real life, depicted passion, became a psychological study, an effort of analysis, the army of bigots fell back all along the line. The Catholic force, which might have been thought better prepared than any others to contest the ground which theology had long since explored, retired in good order, satisfied to cover its retreat by firing from a safe distance, with its old-fashioned match-lock blunderbusses, on works it had neither inspired nor written. The Church party, centuries behind the time, and having made no attempt to follow the evolution of style in the course of ages, now turned to the rustic who can scarcely read; it did not understand more than half of the words used by modern writers, and had become, it must be said, a camp of the illiterate. Incapable of distinguishing the good from the bad, it included in one condemnation the filth of pornography and real works of art; in short, it ended by emitting such folly and talking such preposterous nonsense, that it fell into utter discredit and ceased to count at all. And it would have been so easy for it to work on a little way, to try to keep up with the times, and to understand, to convince itself whether in any given work the author was writing up the Flesh, glorifying it, praising it, and nothing more, or whether, on the contrary, he depicted it merely to buffet it—hating it. And, again, it would have done well to convince itself that there is a chaste as well as a prurient nude, and that it should not cry shame on every picture in which the nude is shown. Above all, it ought to have recognized that vices may well be depicted and studied with a view to exciting disgust of them and showing their horrors.

In temperament the Second Men were curiously different from the earlier species. The same factors were present, but in different proportions, and in far greater subordination to the considered will of the individual. Sexual vigour had returned. But sexual interest was strangely altered. Around the ancient core of delight in physical and mental contact with the opposite sex there now appeared a kind of innately sublimated, and no less poignant, appreciation of the unique physical and mental forms of all kinds of live things. It is difficult for less ample natures to imagine this expansion of the innate sexual interest; for to them it is not apparent that the lusty admiration which at first directs itself solely on the opposite sex is the appropriate attitude to all the beauties of flesh and spirit in beast and bird and plant. Parental interest also was strong in the new species, but it too was universalized. It had become a strong innate interest in, and a devotion to, all beings that were conceived as in need of help. In the earlier species this passionate spontaneous altruism occurred only in exceptional persons. In the new species, however, all normal men and women experienced altruism as a passion. And yet at the same time primitive parenthood had become tempered to a less possessive and more objective love, which among the First Men was less common than they themselves were pleased to believe. Assertiveness had also greatly changed. Formerly very much of a man's energy had been devoted to the assertion of himself as a private individual over against other individuals; and very much of his generosity had been at bottom selfish. But in the Second Men this competitive self-assertion, this championship of the most intimately known animal against all others, was greatly tempered. Formerly the major enterprises of society would never have been carried through had they not been able to annex to themselves the egoism of their champions. But in the Second Men the parts were reversed. Few individuals could ever trouble to exert themselves to the last ounce for merely private ends, save when those ends borrowed interest or import from some public enterprise. It was only his vision of a world-wide community of persons, and of his own function therein, that could rouse the fighting spirit in a man. Thus it was inwardly, rather than in outward physical characters, that the Second Men differed from the First. And in nothing did they differ more than in their native aptitude for cosmopolitanism. They had their tribes and nations. War was not quite unknown amongst them. But even in primitive times a man's most serious loyalty was directed toward the race as a whole; and wars were so hampered by impulses of kindliness toward the enemy that they were apt to degenerate into rather violent athletic contests, leading to an orgy of fraternization. It would not be true to say that the strongest interest of these beings was social. They were never prone to exalt the abstraction called the state, or the nation, or even the world-commonwealth. For their most characteristic factor was not mere gregariousness but something novel, namely an innate interest in personality, both in the actual diversity of persons and in the ideal of personal development. They had a remarkable power of vividly intuiting their fellows as unique persons with special needs. Individuals of the earlier species had suffered from an almost insurmountable spiritual isolation from one another. Not even lovers, and scarcely even the geniuses with special insight into personality, ever had anything like accurate vision of one another. But the Second Men, more intensely and accurately self-conscious, were also more intensely and accurately conscious of one another. This they achieved by no unique faculty, but solely by a more ready interest in each other, a finer insight, and a more active imagination.

Her mouth tastes sweet like sin, salvation, and second chances.

his enemies in chapter 19 as the “great supper of God” where the birds of prey eat the flesh of his defeated foes (19:17). While Leviathan is not included in this Revelation passage, it is the same kind of nature banquet motif as described in Psalm 74: creatures feasting on the flesh of the enemies of God. The “banquet of flesh” was a common way of symbolizing deliverance from and victory

But there is a third ingredient in the foundation of our identity, and it is probably the essential one—it is the reason this delicate discussion is taking place in a book about time: memory. We are not a collection of independent processes in successive moments. Every moment of our existence is linked by a peculiar triple thread to our past—the most recent and the most distant—by memory. Our present swarms with traces of our past. We are histories of ourselves, narratives. I am not this momentary mass of flesh reclined on the sofa typing the letter a on my laptop; I am my thoughts full of the traces of the phrases that I am writing; I am my mother’s caresses, and the serene kindness with which my father calmly guided me; I am my adolescent travels; I am what my reading has deposited in layers in my mind; I am my loves, my moments of despair, my friendships, what I’ve written, what I’ve heard; the faces engraved on my memory. I am, above all, the one who a minute ago made a cup of tea for himself. The one who a moment ago typed the word “memory” into his computer. The one who just composed the sentence that I am now completing. If all this disappeared, would I still exist? I am this long, ongoing novel. My life consists of it.

The exchange now spiraled upward into a stratosphere which would remain forever beyond Rose’s ability to fly. Astonished by the dramatic shift from marital affection to ferocious debate, she wondered if it would end in a frenzy of mutual interruption, the torn flesh of ideas floating in a pool of bloody emotion.

When Ellen announced that supper was ready Douglas Starr told Emily to go out to it. “I don’t want anything tonight. I’ll just lie here and rest. And when you come in again we’ll have a real talk, Elfkin.” He smiled up at her his old, beautiful smile, with the love behind it, that Emily always found so sweet. She ate her supper quite happily—though it wasn’t a good supper. The bread was soggy and her egg was underdone, but for a wonder she was allowed to have both Saucy Sal and Mike sitting, one on each side of her, and Ellen only grunted when Emily fed them wee bits of bread and butter. Mike had such a cute way of sitting up on his haunches and catching the bits in his paws, and Saucy Sal had her trick of touching Emily’s ankle with an almost human touch when her turn was too long in coming. Emily loved them both, but Mike was her favourite. He was a handsome, dark-grey cat with huge owl-like eyes, and he was so soft and fat and fluffy. Sal was always thin; no amount of feeding put any flesh on her bones. Emily liked her, but never cared to cuddle or stroke her because of her thinness. Yet there was a sort of weird beauty about her that appealed to Emily. She was grey-and-white—very white and very sleek, with a long, pointed face, very long ears and very green eyes. She was a redoubtable fighter, and strange cats were vanquished in one round. The fearless little spitfire would even attack dogs and rout them utterly. Emily loved her pussies. She had brought them up herself, as she proudly said. They had been given to her when they were kittens by her Sunday School teacher. “A living present is so nice,” she told Ellen, “because it keeps on getting nicer all the time.

The sensation of motion speaks to the soul. We are no longer bound by the limitations of our flesh. We fly on the wind and the water, toward a destination that promises sanctuary. A living metaphor. A glimmer of transcendence.

Even a novel drawn from reality, faithful to it, is not the truth, just as the image in the mirror is not a person in flesh and blood. It remains, that is, an abstraction, no matter how realistic, how close to the facts.

His thoughts were much upon death that summer of 1918. The death of Masters had shocked him more than he wished to admit; and the first American casualty lists from Europe were beginning to be released. When he had thought of death before, he had thought of it either as a literary event or as the slow, quiet attrition of time against imperfect flesh. He had not thought of it as the explosion of violence upon a battlefield, as the gush of blood from the ruptured throat.

Then Mercy itself took flesh and came among them, for he was love, and he felt everything that they had felt. He was love, and their descendants killed him, and to this day there are many who kill him, and also do they kill his image upon sight, for he is love, and men prefer darkness to light and fear to love.

If you want to assign dubious motives to anyone, you should start with the Creator who set this game in motion in the first place, who trapped your strange little wandering souls in flesh-cages and then demanded you look away

She is real. Flesh and full and fallen and I will love her. Even if in the end, on the very last page, I will lose her too.

As he bit into the oily green flesh, Fairchild couldn't have known he was holding in his hands the future crop of the American Southwest. But he had a hunch. It was a black-skinned fruit, a variety of alligator pear, or as the Aztecs called it, "avocado," a derivative of their word for testicle. It grew in pairs, and had an oblong, bulbous shape. The fruit had the consistency of butter and was a little stringy. But unlike the other avocados he had tasted farther north, in Jamaica and Venezuela, this one had remarkable consistency. Every fruit on the tree was the same size and ripened at the same pace, rare qualities for anything that grew in the consistent warmth of the subtropics. In Santiago, where a boat had deposited Fairchild and Lathrop, the avocado had an even greater quality. Fairchild listened intently as someone explained that the fruit could withstand a mild frost as low as twenty-three degrees Fahrenheit. Such a climatic range suggested a perfect crop for America. From central Mexico, the worldwide home of the first avocados, centuries of settlers had carried the fruit south to Chile. David Fairchild mused about taking it the other way, back north. "A valuable find for California," he wrote. "This is a black-fruited, hardy variety." Lathrop tagged along on the daytime expedition when Fairchild tasted that avocado. He agreed that a fruit so hardy, so versatile, would perfectly answer farmers' pleas for novel but undemanding crops, ones that almost grew themselves, provided the right conditions. Fairchild didn't know the chemical properties of the avocado's fatty flesh, or that a hundred years in the future it would, like quinoa, find esteem, owing to its combination of fat and vitamins. But he could tell that such a curious fruit, unlike any other, must have an equally curious evolutionary history. No earthly mammal could digest a seed as big as the avocado's, and certainly not anything that roamed wild through South America.

As yet, there was nothing for it but to endure. We became fond of responding to irony in novels of love as one would to a finger pressed against the flesh near an open sore.

the cooling flesh Tony was sick and almost passed out. With a gun to his head, Kyle made him saw right through that limb, then place it in the mincing machine himself. 'You're now fully aware of what's going on here, Tony, and you are an accomplice to it. If you ever breathe a word of it to anybody, I will take one of your children and feed them to the pigs. Even if the police get to me before, I can make it happen, I will arrange it from my prison cell. I'll tell the man whose wife you just cut up that you screwed her dead body before you got rid of her. He'll come for one of your children and do the

She approached the couple and watched them for a moment. They looked pathetic, writhing down there in the sand and fumbling at each other’s clothes like desperate, love-struck teenagers. They disgusted her. The male sensed her presence and turned to face her. She immediately noticed the fear behind his stubborn glare and it aroused her. Her scar throbbed and pulsated as she withdrew the knife from the sheaf and dragged it across his throat. As the blade tore through flesh and sinew she once more heard the retort of the rifle, felt her cheekbone shatter. The blood poured from him just as the blood had spurted from the wound in the deer’s throat.

For some reason, the Mo Ran in this dream was wholly different from the one Chu Wanning knew. That deferential ingratiation had vanished, replaced by a domineering presence. He could distinctly feel Mo Ran’s heated breaths as he exhaled, low and rapid, animalistic desire searing like lava and threatening to melt him down, flesh and bone alike.

Tonight," said Potapov, and his wrinkled nose quivered above his thin lips, "we intend to adopt a new resolution, not only for Ispas, but for all the villages in the region. From this moment on, until further notice, every breeder of horses, like you, Comrade Lazar, will endeavor— No, he won't try, he will succeed! - Yes, he will succeed 100 percent The pregnancy and birth of all female mares!" The fifty people in the hall fell silent, and Potapov asked, "Is that clear? Something unclear in my words?" "Something unclear in my words?" Isabel came back after him. "Yes, Comrade Potapov," said Roman. "There are some unclear things." Isabelle and Sissy pinched him, and Isabelle continued to whisper in Potapov's unpleasant tenor voice, "One hundred percent pregnancy and birth of all female mares!" Sissy almost laughed out loud. Roman broke away from his wife and sister and walked to the aisle between the pews, from which He could speak without interruption from them. "You said you were an animal enclosure expert from Moscow?" Roman asked. "Please teach us how to achieve such extraordinary results." Ostap rose - Ostap, who never spoke at these assemblies! Even Yana was shocked. "Forgive me," said Ostap, seeming not to believe his own impudence, "but that's what they call female mares in Moscow, 'mares women'? Because here in Ukraine they simply say 'mares'." "Never mind," said Potapov. "And the mares, by the way, don't give birth," added Ostap with eyes burning with hatred and in a low voice with contempt. "They give birth." "Well, let's talk." Potapov pointed to the members of the Lazar family who were sitting with Mirik and Petka. "Comrade Zhuk told me about you, the Lazar family," Potapov said. Petka immediately got up and moved to another place. Mirik also moved his chair a little further - only a few centimeters, but still! He was staying away so he wouldn't be lumped in with those troublesome lazars, Isabelle thought. Unbelievable. Problematic like his wife, himself and his flesh. "We believe," said Potapov, "that you are using your horses by means of sabotage against the Soviet state." "And how do we do that?" asked Roman, who stood beside his brother. By having your mares give birth only once a year!" I don't create a horse, Comrade Potapov, I only quarter him." The mare's gestation period is eleven months," Roman said. "If you need to improve! Why do your horses, which you are apparently so famous for, only give birth to one foal per horse?" Potapov asked. "Why is their pregnancy so long? Almost a year? It's unthinkable! Can't you speed up the birth earlier and quarter them again? Or see if there's a way to make a mare carry two foals in one place? That would be very productive!" The members of the Lazar family looked forward and not at each other, lest they openly express contempt and be arrested for the crime of rowing under the Soviet Union. It is impossible to respect something that is despised, the Christian Jesus was right in that, Isabel thought, and wished that Roman would bite his tongue. Vitaly and Stan, Oleg Tretyak, the evicted Kubal, and most recently Andreyush - all these poor people were witnesses and victims of Stalin's total dedication to the reign of terror. Soon even the pretense that the rule of law exists will be abandoned. Yana got to her feet with an effort and held the chair rest. "I have to go," she said. "As you can see, I'm a pregnant female about to give birth. But maybe the experts from Moscow should spend some time around the stable during the calving season before they start giving recommendations." Yana nodded to Roman and Ostap and left the hall with a wobbly gait. Isabelle thought that Yana was slowing down for Potapov's sake. Just a few hours ago she jumped on the back of a horse and then got off above him without help and without effort. Potapov paid no attention to Yana's words or to her departure. "We need to solve th''e horse problem!" said the man.

Pastor Madison looked steadily at the jurors, cleared his throat and started to read.          “Marriage is what brings us together today. Where did the idea of marriage come from? What is marriage? Does marriage have any purpose in this modern age? Is it really a blessed arrangement? Why shouldn’t anyone, or any group of someones, be allowed to marry? Is marriage in danger of extinction? These are all questions, along with others, that we will examine today and in the next three week’s sermons.             “First, where did the idea of marriage come from? Who thought it up? I’m going to read to you a few sentences from a sermon given by a Swedish Pastor named Ake Green. Pay attention to what he said, because he was arrested and convicted by the Swedish judicial system for what he said. As you listen to the beginning of Pastor Green’s sermon, ask yourself if you think his words are hate words. The Swedish government charged and convicted Pastor Green with a hate crime for these words. Here are Pastor Green’s opening few paragraphs:             “From the beginning God created humans as man and woman. We begin in Genesis 1:27-28: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."             “Here, God's Word clearly states that you were created to be Father and Mother - as man and woman - designed for parenthood. The Lord states that very clearly here….The marriage institution is also clearly defined in Genesis 2:24, where it says: "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh."             “Only man and wife are referred to here. It is not stated any other way; you can never imply or interpret it to mean that you can have whatever sexual partner you wish to have. ….”             “What was it that led to these cities (Sodom, mentioned 30 times in the Bible, and Gomorrah) perishing, losing their dignity, disappearing from the face of the Earth? It was because they lived in homosexuality. It will be the same on that day when the Son of Man is revealed; consequently, this is a sign of the times we are facing. As people lived in the time of Lot, so shall they live before Jesus returns. This is something we cannot deny in any way. Jesus says that the lifestyle of Sodom shall be active in the whole Earth before the coming of Jesus. The one who represents this lifestyle today goes against God's order of creation.

You’re not afraid to take risks.” “Neither are you, Diana. Don’t ever lose that quality. Once a person stops pushing and growing, she is as dead in the spirit as if she were dead in the flesh.

The characters who go to make up my stories and novels are not portraits. Characters I invent along with the story that carries them. Attached to them are what I've borrowed, perhaps unconsciously, bit by bit, of persons I have seen or noticed or remembered in the flesh - a cast of countenance here, a manner of walking there, that jumps to the visualizing mind when a story is under way. I don't write by invasion into the life of a real person: my own sense of privacy is too strong for that; and I also know instinctively that living people to whom you are close - those known to you in ways too deep, too overflowing, ever to be plumbed outside love - do not yield to, could never fit into, the demands of a story. Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write most entirely out of yourself, that a character becomes in its own right another human being on the page.

The pain outlives the flesh.

Here’s a fun fact for you. Flies are necrophageous. That means they feed on the flesh of the dead. Yes, just like zombies. Actually, many insects are necrophageous. Will I become necrophageous? I won’t lie. It’s a pretty cool word. Necrophageous.

She had to be cautious. As much as part of her hated her with every ounce of her flesh, she also loved her. She couldn’t quite reconcile the two, the love with the hate. Instead of feeling like a fluid stream with one on each end, her emotions drifting somewhere in the middle, where love and hate exist simultaneously, she flipped from one dramatic extreme to the other. Sometimes she loved her so much she wanted to devour her, and other times she hated her so much she thought she might kill her.

The diseased flesh fragments were then pocketed and brought along to their next targets and home villages, causing the spread of diseases twice-fold. The terrible event was immortalized in James Fenimore Cooper's celebrated novel, The Last of the Mohicans. The French and Indian Wars wound down in 1763, following the signing of the Treaties of Hubertusburg and Paris. The French were forced to give up Louisianan and Canadian territories, which were obtained by the Spanish.

We run in silence, enjoying the sunrise over the ocean and I swear there are few things more beautiful than this. Pinks and purples and yellows fill the sky, bathing us in light. The salty breeze brushes my skin, sticking to my moistened flesh.

I write well-fleshed out characters, and inevitably, more ideas spring from my subconscious. They all have a little bit of me in them. It’s very hard to figure out in advance how a story will unfold, but after having written so many novels, I feel more comfortable letting the ideas come up from somewhere in my own subconscious. Writing is much easier now because that sense of panic I used to experience doesn’t set in as I begin a new book.

A skeptic of all sentimentality, she has a witty, rueful voice that gives a deadpan appraisal of the past and present. We see the patriotism of World War I turn to chalk as the telegrams begin arriving at home. During the red scares of the 1930s, we listen to the rumbles of labor strife while wealthy barons deride those downtown ruffians pretending to be unemployed. Atwood's crisp wit and steely realism are reminiscent of Edith Wharton - but don't forget that side order of comic-book science fiction. How goofy to repeatedly interrupt this haunting novel with episodes about the Lizard Men of Xenor. And yet, what great fun this is - and how brilliantly it works to flesh out the dime-novel culture of the 1930s and to emphasize the precarious position of women.

Wounds of the flesh mend with time, but not always those of the soul. They can continue to bleed long after being inflicted, sometimes even festering with bitterness, anger and despair.     “You

He found Granny on the porch, asleep. Her chin sat on her chest, rising and falling with her breath. He gathered her up in his arms, light as a girl, and carried her inside to her room. He covered her in her old handed-down quilt. The outer layers were burnished to a luster over decades of sleeping flesh, the inner batting composed of older blankets still. He tucked it under her feet, her elbows and shoulders, and went out into the den and opened the door of the wood stove. A mouth of red coals. He added two lengths of the seasoned white oak they kept stacked on the porch, hot-burning wood for cold nights, and stoked it to a fury before stepping outside.

He noticed his partner asleep beside him and his mouth salivated. He longed to rip into his flesh. It was an urge unlike any he’d ever known. The desire to dine on flesh and blood excited him to the point of orgasm. He could hold back no longer.

It's not just the hair-prickling adventure. It's the relationship between the two of them. All await their newest adventure- and the next installment of Demon of Dartmoor. I predict Raven and Rowan shall... well, we shall see. It's not only their extraordinary encounters with all manner of unearthly creatures that hold everyone enthralled, but the pull between them. All I can say is that when the two are together- the combination of peril and passion- well, one can fairly feel the way they sizzle-and so does my flesh!" "My God, you make it sound as if they're real people!" "An acknowledgement to the author's talent to think of them so, don't you think?" "Perhaps, but it sounds like an erotic novel, not a horror novel, or even a Gothic novel." Aidan tipped his head to the side. "Knowing you, Alec, now I begin to see why you are so entranced.

Satchie: Excuse me, I'm an enlisted man too. Nothing more was said. In the dark wooden room, Kenny and Satchie had the seethe of men with hardened hearts seered by the stench of burned human flesh. No smell like it, Satchie remembered. Gut-curling, episodic explosion of the soul that blasted even the bearest of men. So they hung in joints under Jax signs and Dixie beer relics where they drank their poison and enjoyed false remedy.

It was a common fallacy among survivors that zombies were strong.  This was incorrect.  The average zombie, by itself, was weak with little muscle control.  The creatures were pure instinct. Whatever intelligence they had was gone with their first death, lost forever.  It was their numbers that gave them strength.  A strong man or woman with a weapon and their wits could easily take out ten to fifteen zombies.  But behind those ten to fifteen lay fifty or a hundred more, untiring, unrelenting in their search for flesh. A human tired, a zombie didn’t. This was their greatest strength.

A pulpy mass of flesh with exposed veins slithered on the kitchen floor. Blood red tentacles lashed out, like an overgrown octopus. Multiple heads and mouths with razor-sharp teeth covered its body. The demon ignored Kara and crawled towards Mrs. Wilkins.

Dorian? Is that an important publisher?" "Count Dorian is really famous. How do you not know him?" "I can only think of the Dorian in the painting. You know, Oscar Wilde’s beautiful, cursed one?" he says. "Sorry. And, anyway, why is he important?" he asks, noting her apprehension. "Well, for one thing, he’s a Count." "Pardon..." he mocks, in a French accent. "Why is this Count famous?" "Because he cultivates young talent. He’s launched a lot of young people in different fields: music, painting, sculpture, fashion, theater, movies." She pauses for breath. "And writers, too." "So he’s a type of patron." She nods. "And he’s contacted you about your novels?" She nods again. "And what’s the problem?" "He has an estate in Tuscany, as well as houses in New York and Hong Kong. And he’s asked to meet me." "Are you embarrassed to go on your own? I can take you if you want. But if he’s a talent hunter, you just need to act as natural as possible and you'll be fine. I imagine he’s used to it. He can’t not like you," he says, caressing her face. "He thinks I’m a man..," she whispers. Andrea freezes. "Eh?!" he exclaims, looking at her and suddenly feeling a strange foreboding. "I

She leans her head on him again. "I have a secret." she says. He stays silent, touching her face. "I’d like to confide in you." She sits up. "But you have to swear not to tell anyone." She looks at him, raising an eyebrow, before lowering her head and a curtain of hair covers her face. "I’d die of shame." Andrea takes her strands of hair and moves them back. "I swear. Cross my heart, like when we were little. Okay?" he makes a sign on his chest. She nods and takes two deep breaths. "It's a little long. I don’t know where to start." "Take all the time you need." He sits up and plays with the grass while he waits. "Well…." She lifts her clasped hands to her mouth. "I've written two novels," she begins. "Really?" Andrea gasps. "Great! Have they been published?" She nods. "How are they doing?" "Well," she says, decisively. "I’m very happy." "I’ll look you up and have a read." She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. "I’m under a pseudonym, to be honest." Andrea raises his eyebrows. "Ah, I see. So that you feel more free to express yourself, I guess." Susy shakes her head. That isn’t the reason. "Is it because of the stories? Are they strange?" Susy looks down and puts a finger to her mouth, biting the nail. "A little." "Are they really violent? Do you write Tarantino type stories?" he jokes. "No, no." Andrea senses that they have started a guessing game. One piece of information at a time and then he will get to the answer. "Ah! I’ve got it," he points at her. "Love stories? Or, wait. What are they called....?" He snaps his fingers. "Barbara reads them. Those books with vampires, angels and….." "Paranormal Romance? No, not that either." Andrea scratches his ear. "Thrillers, crime novels, science fiction?" Only biographies and reference books remain. She shakes her head again and Andrea folds his arms in puzzlement. "What books have you written then?" Susy whispers a word, her finger in her mouth, and Andrea doesn’t catch it. He takes away her hand and moves closer to her. "Huh?" "Erotic novels," she says, blushing. Andrea gasps and looks at her, wide-eyed, then bursts out laughing and throws himself onto the ground. He holds his stomach and rolls around. "I don’t believe it..." he says, doubled up with laughter. "I knew I shouldn’t have told you!" she blurts out and starts getting up. Andrea grabs her arm. "Please. Sorry," he says. "It’s just that you don’t seem like a housewife who does S&M in the living room." Susy folds her arms. "No, I don’t write about that kind of fantasy." "What type of fantasy do you write about?" he asks with a mischievous smile. "First love in the classroom? Romance, but with sex?" He waves his eyebrows, amused. "Stupid!" she replies, annoyed. "Alright." He clears his throat. "I won’t make fun of you. I promise. I'm listening." He becomes serious again, biting his lips. Susy

You're almost ready now." Nicolle takes some soft leather bands and closes them around his wrists, leaving the rings dangling. "Just the wings and then we’ve finished." She opens another suitcase and, one after the other, the angel wings appear. They’re made out of real feathers and some parts are splashed with blood. One is shorter than the other; one is broken so they’re asymmetric. "They’re fantastic," he says, hit by the truth. She grabs one and hooks it on. "Thank you, I’ll let the creator know." They’re not as light as they seem and Andrea has to regain his balance when she attaches the other one. Nicolle stands back in front of him to admire him. "How do you feel?" Andrea finds it a little hard to breathe, the collar pulling on him now that he has the wings. He moves, still feeling imprisoned by an indefinable sensation, halfway between pleasure and discomfort. "I have to get used to it." "Be careful, you might find that you like it." Nicolle lets herself go with a refined laugh, hand over her mouth. "You’re not helping me like that. I'm already nervous," he sighs, starting to feel tense. "But, do you like it? Is it like in your novel?" he asks her, worried.

That’s great. The dizziness goes away after you’ve done about five Vega—after that, piece of cake. You won’t feel a thing.” David smiled at her, teeth bared. Kara rubbed her forearm and pressed her hand against her mortal flesh. “Wow, this is still so weird!” She passed her hand gently on her skin. “It feels synthetic. Like there’s a layer of saran wrap on top. Creepy,” she laughed. She let go of her arm and looked around the car. “So … where are we?” She strained her eyes to see outside the car windows.

knowingly in such a manner, Elder Sister.” “You were a help then, to your flesh kin? A daughter they

In the faith of the Church, we put on the mind of Christ. Through Christ’s body, the Church, we are joined truly to him in his risen flesh, received in the Holy Eucharist. Unless someone lives Christ’s life authentically in the Church, the Lord becomes one more character in a novel, one more cultural token to be exploited for any purpose we choose.

preached in meat and potatoes style, or fire and brimstone to some, which is to say that he preached to a lot of older in spirit Christians who didn’t need all that pap about their best life or whatever that some mega-church pastors preached. When he was in the Air Force, Brian had attended those kinds of churches, but never felt like he grew as a Christian while attending. In fact, he felt like he’d regressed. In Omaha, Brian and his family attended a church that was the combination of the two. The first service was for traditional folks who wanted their spirits refreshed and the other service is for the people who need their fleshly tastes, mostly in music, satisfied. Brian’s mom used to say that their family probably could’ve fit right in at churches run by Jonathan Edwards, Cotton Mather, or even the Amish and Mennonites.

The pastor shoved forth the testimony that a member of the rock metal group you are paying to see has admitted to consuming human flesh! He did not waste time citing references. It was gospel. His young ladies and young men joggled their heads gravely at each apocalyptic pronunciamento. The pastor fireballed onward with that trapped but defiant look Sam Houston must have gotten when he saw his buddies dropping like mosquitoes at the Alamo. Lucas wondered whether this dude had ever wasted pulpit time on a consideration of the act of communion as symbolic cannibalism.

glanced over at a pair of red chests located in the far corner right as a little kid popped out from behind. He wasn't older than a toddler, really. His thin blond hair stuck up on top. He waved his arms as if to say hi. He looked cute except for his frosted eyes and blood dripping down his lips. "Oh dang. It's a baby," Misty said. "Yeah, a baby zombie," I said. "Kill it." The little kid walked towards us on unsteady feet, smiling like it wanted to be friends. Only it really wanted to eat our flesh. I'd taken off my Super Soaker to drive. I had nothing to shoot with. "Someone, shoot that thing!" I screamed. "Nate, I don't think I can shoot a baby." "It's not a baby, it's a zombie—look at its eyes. Kali, you shoot it. Do it now!

Interesting. Perhaps this is an early childhood necro-sapien trait. An attempt to gain sympathy from humans in order to procure an opportunity to consume their flesh." I

About the source of the contaminate that has resulted in the re-animation of the deceased." "We saw zombies running around and kinda assumed they wanted to eat our brains or something," I said. "Actually it's flesh. The necro—um, zombies desire to consume flesh, not specifically brains. Although human cerebral matter is high in fatty—

November 30th What do you know? For once I favourably surprise myself. After I'd read Howard's exemplary "White Ship" on Friday night and spent yesterday idling about in Providence - woolgathering, I suppose - I've finally made up my mind to sit down and attempt to lick this novel into some kind of functional shape. The central character I'm thinking, is a young man in his early thirties. He's well educated, but if forced by economic circumstance to leave his home in somewhere like Milwaukee (on the principle of writing about somewhere that you know) to seek employment further east. I feel I should give him a name. I know that details of this sort could wait until much later in the process, but I don't feel able to flesh out his character sufficiently until I've at least worked out what he's called. There's been a twenty minute pause between the end of the foregoing sentence and the start of this one, but I think his first name should be Jonathan. Jonathan Randall is the name that comes to me, perhaps by way of Randall Carver. Yes, I think I like the sound of that. So, young Jonathan Randall realises that his yearnings for a literary life have to be put aside to spare his parents dwindling resources, and that he must make his own way in the world, through manual labour if needs be, in order to become the self-sufficient grownup he aspires to be. During an early scene, perhaps in a recounting of Jonathan's childhood, there should be some striking incident which foreshadows the supernatural or psychological weirdness that will dominate the later chapters. Thinking about this, it seems to me that this would be the ideal place to introduce the bridge motif I've toyed with earlier in these pages: since I'm quite fond of the opening paragraphs that I've already written, with that long description of America as a repository for all the world's religious or else occult visionaries, I think what I'll do is largely leave that as it is, to function as a kind of prologue and establish the requisite mood, and then open the novel proper with Jonathan and a school friend playing truant on a summer's afternoon at some remote and overgrown ravine or other, where there's a precarious and creaking bridge with fraying ropes and missing boards that joins the chasm's two sides. I could probably set up the story's major themes and ideas in the two companions' dialogue, albeit simply expressed in keeping with their age and limited experience. Perhaps they're talking in excited schoolboy tones about some local legend, ghost story or piece of folklore that's connected with the bridge or the ravine. This would provide a motive - the eternal boyish fascination with the ghoulish - for them having come to this ill-omened spot while playing hooky, and would also help establish Jonathan's obsession with folkloric subjects as explored in the remainder of the novel.

November 30th What do you know? For once I favourably surprise myself. After I'd read Howard's exemplary "White Ship" on Friday night and spent yesterday idling about in Providence - woolgathering, I suppose - I've finally made up my mind to sit down and attempt to lick this novel into some kind of functional shape. The central character I'm thinking, is a young man in his early thirties. He's well educated, but is forced by economic circumstance to leave his home in somewhere like Milwaukee (on the principle of writing about somewhere that you know) to seek employment further east. I feel I should give him a name. I know that details of this sort could wait until much later in the process, but I don't feel able to flesh out his character sufficiently until I've at least worked out what he's called. There's been a twenty minute pause between the end of the foregoing sentence and the start of this one, but I think his first name should be Jonathan. Jonathan Randall is the name that comes to me, perhaps by way of Randall Carver. Yes, I think I like the sound of that. So, young Jonathan Randall realises that his yearnings for a literary life have to be put aside to spare his parents' dwindling resources, and that he must make his own way in the world, through manual labour if needs be, in order to become the self-sufficient grownup he aspires to be. During an early scene, perhaps in a recounting of Jonathan's childhood, there should be some striking incident which foreshadows the supernatural or psychological weirdness that will dominate the later chapters. Thinking about this, it seems to me that this would be the ideal place to introduce the bridge motif I've toyed with earlier in these pages: since I'm quite fond of the opening paragraphs that I've already written, with that long description of America as a repository for all the world's religious or else occult visionaries, I think what I'll do is largely leave that as it is, to function as a kind of prologue and establish the requisite mood, and then open the novel proper with Jonathan and a school friend playing truant on a summer's afternoon at some remote and overgrown ravine or other, where there's a precarious and creaking bridge with fraying ropes and missing boards that joins the chasm's two sides. I could probably set up the story's major themes and ideas in the two companions' dialogue, albeit simply expressed in keeping with their age and limited experience. Perhaps they're talking in excited schoolboy tones about some local legend, ghost story or piece of folklore that's connected with the bridge or the ravine. This would provide a motive - the eternal boyish fascination with the ghoulish - for them having come to this ill-omened spot while playing hooky, and would also help establish Jonathan's obsession with folkloric subjects as explored in the remainder of the novel.

Life is different now. I do not have time. If I work twelve hours a day, six days a week, it is because I wish to give him a good life. I love him.” “He does not know it. Love is a word. It must have flesh. He will suffer.” “Life is suffering”, said Papa. “Yes, life is trouble. But we should not make more than is our due.” “You do not understand.” “I understand very well. It is because we have become poor”, Grandfather said to Papa. “You do not like to be poor, and who can blame you. But it is not so bad to be poor if there is food and love. Better to be poor than a rich orphan. Listen to me, my son.

before, a slicing, tearing burning in her right leg that made her crumple and bite down on her wrist, drawing blood before she would let herself scream. She fell hard against the metal of the car. She tried to move but something held fast, something that wrenched at her leg. Her ears rang. She reached down and felt her ankle. That was a mistake. The pain seared again as she felt the metal jaws and jagged teeth that had snapped shut on her leg. A trap, left for anyone trying to use this car to escape. And she had been stupid enough to try. Gritting her teeth, her eyes streaming and the occasional whimper escaping no matter how hard she tried, she pulled apart the trap. She felt metal tearing at flesh and even the smallest effort to rest weight on her leg made her want to collapse. The trigger mechanism she’d stepped on raised and clicked back into place, the trap an open circle of serrated metal again. She moved clear, pulling herself up on the car, then she heard snarling and grunting that seemed to come out of nowhere.

Debra Bokur has written an immersive, thoroughly researched tale of mystery and mythology that will enlighten as well as entertain. It’s honestly been a while since I’ve wanted to be able to physically join the cast of a novel I’m reading, but The Fire Thief had me longing to solve mysteries with Kali and crew in the flesh. Kali herself is a terrific addition to the world of police procedurals, an original and unconventional heroine who is easy to root for. I can’t wait to read more about her!

​“I need you more,” he says. “And I’ll do anything to keep you. And I’ll wait for however long it takes for me to have you. I promise you that, even if it means never.

This is the one thing about secrets. Eventually, they consume you.

I’m cheating on my husband and that’s the only way people would see it. They’d hate me. They’d judge me. But how can you judge someone if you’ve never walked in their shoes?

The intelligentsia, the politicians, the rabbis, and the Jewish leadership, in general, ignored this book at the time. It seemed to them hollow and eccentric. “They ignored in Hitler’s book what was written clearly for all to see: “No one should be surprised if the guise of Satan lives among us, the very embodiment of evil, in the image of the flesh and blood Jew….” “These exact words were published in 1925, fourteen years before their realization. Hitler did not hesitate to declare repeatedly his intensions, including during his address to the German Parliament in 1938, one year before beginning their actualization

Sheila-sama is a member of the — “ A hand suddenly gripped my shoulder, claws dug into my flesh.

We emerge from prison bearing agonies that would crush a stone. How do we survive these? We transform them. We get a tattoo. We ink an entire sleeve. We cover our chest and back with swastikas, death’s-heads, and quotes in bogus Mandarin from Kill Bill, Volume Two. We blast our pecs. We pierce our flesh. We customize Harleys. We shave our skull. We craft an image of ourselves, even if it’s one—especially if it’s one—as predictable as low-ride jeans and chrome-link wallet chains. That’s art. That’s our novel. This is what the writer wrestles with. This is the passage. You pound keyboards until you wear the sonsofbitches out. Each page is trash. Unreadable. Unpublishable.

Billy will make a fine drowned,” said Spidroth. “I’m sure he will feast on the flesh of many sailors in the years to come.

In the produce section she stopped to inhale the smell of so many oranges- Valencia, blood, juice, navel- net bags of limes, stacks of pineapples. The hygienic overtones of bleach were also in the air and she sniffed at the scent of chlorine as though it were a delicacy. She picked up a watermelon as big as a child, lifting it with difficulty into her cart. A sheaf of plantains. Peaches thick with fuzz. She chose bottled waters from Maine and Italy, from Germany and France, then proud-colored squeeze bottles of Joy and Cheer, Dove and Palmolive. She reached for high-protein cereals and protein bars, granola with cranberries, Cap'n Crunch. She explored the store, lapping up the light, listening to the music with its brave half-heard songs of love lost and found. Naomi passed by the stacks of mammalian flesh cut into portions wrapped in tight plastic. She lingered at the fish counter to contemplate the blackness of the mussels, the glistening dislocated stripes of the mackerel, the rosy pinkness of the salmon fillets arrayed on the ice. Here were animals still with their eyes on, red snapper and Mediterranean black bass. In a tank of greenish water, lobsters swam with halting deliberation; she pursed her lips and gave a furtive salute, her fingers held like claws.

Fantasize, together: Take a page from The Thousand and One Nights and incorporate a story into foreplay. If you’re not a born storyteller, try reading one aloud together. Some literary recommendations: James Salter’s erotic masterpiece, A Sport and a Pastime; Anais Nin’s collections of short stories Delta of Venus and Little Birds; the erotic novels Emanuelle by Emanuelle Arsan and Story of O by Pauline Réage; Harold Brodkey’s sexual saga “Innocence”—perhaps the greatest depiction of a session of cunnilingus ever penned; novels by Jerzy Kosinski such as Passion Play and Cockpit; Henry Miller’s Under the Roofs of Paris and Quiet Days in Clichy; My Secret Life by Anonymous and The Pure and the Impure by Colette; Nancy Friday’s anthology of fantasies, Secret Garden (filled with the correspondence of real people’s fantasies); stories from The Mammoth Book of Erotica or one of the many erotic anthologies edited by Susie Bright. For those with a taste for poetry, try Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil) by Charles Baudelaire or Flesh Unlimited by Guillaume Apollinaire. And for those who like comic books (kinky ones, that is), try the extra-hot works of writer/illustrator Eric Stanton,

It is strange that the Yamauba, old and barren and childless, seemed so enamored with children. It is strange that one whose belly has never stretched is still so eager to make it full. But this is not just a story about women and their expectations. This is not just a story about monsters, born from being unable to contort and fit into the small box we have given them and suddenly are afraid of what they have become. This is a story about how deviation from the norm can create scary, monstrous things. What my grandmother didn't know was that years later, society would still create Yamauba. We would still be seen as dark, terrible things simply for refusing to fit a particular narrative. Perhaps you, the monster that you are, find yourself feeding on what you could not bear yourself. Perhaps Yamauba were created because we did not want to name something we brought forth with our own hands. Perhaps flesh-eating monsters are simply people who break their molds, and their boxes, and find themselves demanding all they have been denied.

DESTROY HIM, EAT HIM. DEVOUR HIS FLESH, DRINK HIM DRY OF BLOOD, TAKE EVERYTHING.

Real life is unbelievable. Souls are snatched away from us, flesh and blood turn to dust, people you love betray you, men go to way over nothing. IT's all preposterous. That's why we have novels. To make sense out of things.

He sighed. All good intentions aside, sometimes he wondered, who am I kidding? Because sometimes he wondered if what was really driving him was guilt; guilt for walking away that November morning, through the acrid smell of burning fuel and the burning rubber smell from the bombed-out Jeeps; for looking at his hands and counting his fingers while the smell of the moist earth ejected by exploding Viet Cong shells mingled with the stench of burning flesh; and most of all, for being able to walk at all and for being able to see, smell and experience the nightmares that still haunted him nightly and the visions that still came during the day. He was guilty for feeling relief— relief that it was not his mangled body lying half-in and half-out of the blackened shell of a burned-out military vehicle; it wasn’t his headless torso next to a crater; and, it wasn’t his body zipped into one of the dark plastic body bags that lined the edge of the tarmac, waiting for pickup and removal by the C-130 transports the day he went home.

Real life is unbelievable. Souls are snatched away from us, flesh and blood turn to dust, people you love betray you, men go to war over nothing. It's all preposterous. That's why we have novels. To make sense of things.

Where does all that leave the cinema? First, we must acknowledge that a film is a photograph of a drama, and that skilful use of the camera can never excuse the paltriness, sentimentality or weakness of the action. What I have said about modernism and its search for an art that will perpetuate the ethical vision, applies as much to the cinema as it does to the other arts. There are directors who have presented dramas that can be compared with the great modern works for the stage – Bergman, for instance, in Wild Strawberries, where an original situation, conveyed through masterly dialogue, is enhanced by dream sequences and flashbacks of a kind that can be managed successfully only through the skilful cutting that is the essential ingredient in cinematic art. Secondly, however, we must remember the distinction between fantasy and imagination, and the inherent tendency of the camera to realise what it shows – to present not a world of imagination, but a substitute reality. This is never more obvious than in the case of sex and violence, and is the root cause of the fact that these now dominate the cine screen, and would dominate television too, were it not for the censor. With the aid of the camera you can realise violence or the sexual act completely, and so minister to the fantasy which has sex or violence as its focus. If fantasy breaks through the tissue of imagination, then the dramatic thought is scattered, and the imaginative emotions along with it: drama then sinks into the background, and all that we have is obscenity – human flesh without the soul. Hence many people are quickly satiated by cinematic representations, and at the same time deeply disturbed and absorbed by features (violence in particular) which, from the dramatic point of view, have little intrinsic meaning. Imagination withers when realisation blooms, and the ethical view of our condition withers along with it. It is a significant fact that most cinema-goers are disposed to see their favourite films only a few times, and that even people whose interest is not in the drama but in the blood, screams, and orgasms have no great interest in revisiting the last occasion of excitement, and will proceed joylessly to the next one without raising the question of the value of what they watch. This contrasts with every other kind of dramatic art – theatre, novel, opera, dramatic poem – in which the perception of beauty brings with it a desire constantly to return to the source, to re-enact in our emotions a drama which never loses its point for us, since it touches the question why we are here.

At a certain point I went to look for Dede. I found her in the hall with Mirko and her doll. They were pretending to be a mother and father with their baby, but it wasn’t peaceful: they were pretending to have a fight. I stopped. Dede instructed Mirko: You have to hit me, understand? The new living flesh was replicating the old in a game, we were a chain of shadows who had always been on the stage with the same burden of love, hatred, desire, and violence.

Let’s build a home.” Grinding against Shen Zechuan’s soft flesh, Xiao Chiye’s throat tightened as he spoke between escaped sighs. “Here. Anywhere.

I hold him tight, tighter, tightest—and find myself distraught that we cannot draw closer. Cannot merge flesh. At least, not yet.

Yes, he had seen the dead alive again; he had seen his Meriem in the flesh. She lived! She had not died! He had seen her—he had seen his Meriem—IN THE ARMS OF ANOTHER MAN!

The voice was the tip of a long cold stiletto, inserting itself into Stephen’s belly with infinite, almost lackadaisical, slowness. The voice was a forkload of maggoty flesh, pressed insistently against his lips. The voice was a Checker cab, wheeling suddenly around some corner and straight toward him, with its bright eyes glaring over the ravenous, grinning grill. The voice was a train. A long, cold train. Upon him now. And he was powerless before it.

It is related,” said the grandfather, “that a lion, once he has tasted the blood and the flesh of a man, will eat no other meat. Our government has tasted the blood and the flesh of the people; it has tasted, suddenly, unlimited power.

I take out salad ingredients, vegetables, herbs and several knives: peeler, smooth-bladed and serrated. I cut half a cucumber into cubes, then move onto the mushrooms which I slice into little slithers, I go back to the cucumber, cutting wafer-thin slices, skip to topping and tailing green beans, pop whole beetroots into the oven, I scoop the flesh out of avocados and grapefruits, and put the chard into boiling water. The whole idea is not to get bored. The theory, because I have a theory about peeling things, is to leave room for random opportunities. With cooking, as with everything else, we tend to curb our instincts. Speed and chaos allow for a slight loss of control. Cutting vegetables into different shapes and sizes encourages combinations which might not have been thought of otherwise. In a salad of mushrooms, cucumber and lamb's lettuce, the chervil needs to stay whole, in sprigs, to make a contrast because the other ingredients are so fine, almost transparent, and slippery. If its thin stems and tiny branches didn't contradict the general sense of languor- accentuated by the single cream instead of olive oil in the dressing- the whole thing would descend into melancholy.

If sex is a good gift from God designed to bring us joy and bring Him glory, then it’s no wonder Satan wants to distort that gift so that we only experience shame and loneliness. In pornography, the “one-flesh union” of a man and a woman becomes the “no-flesh” aloneness of a man or woman before the flickering images of a screen, or in the pages of a novel.

All those times back in my life when I had thought myself unhappy…how foolish I had been. Any man who experiences the worst looks back on all that was as better. So it was with me. “Call only that man happy who is dead.” The ancient Greeks once said that…but oh ye ones lost in the river of time…if only you knew, if only you knew. Man, no matter what his situation, can be happy, if only he realizes that his situation could be worse. But for me, there was no worse situation; I was like Croesus attached to the pyre, only there was no King to release me from being consumed by the flames. But here, right now, as I write this, I am happy, because I am at war. War is the refuge for those who have nothing better to do. The voice of my conscience, like an ancient Emathion head, was lost in the lust, devoured within the burning fire of my heart. I poured some Beefaronis over my foot. The dim light of the flashlight shone upon it. Then I waited. One came, quickly, running across the room. It leaped at my foot but my hand grabbed it before its teeth could clench down on my foot. The razorblade in my other hand came down hard upon its flesh. As I concentrated on murdering this poor rodent, I did not see the other rat scurrying across the room. The pain was deep. It did not just indulge in Beefaronis, but its teeth dug deeper. I screamed. I let the other rat go, throwing it across the room. I did not know if it was dead or not, but I did not care. I tried grabbing the other rat, but it had dug itself in. I kept screaming. I felt as if a pitchfork was repeatedly struck through my body while I hung chained to a wall. In a way, it almost felt good, because it was different from the deadening dullness that was normal.

[Father Aberforth]: “...Have you figured out what you’re going to do with this married man of yours?” ... “I’m not here to judge you, girl. You think you’re the first sheep to wander out of the fold because greener pastures beckon?” He reached for his tea. “At least you show some originality. Most priests who dabble in adultery go for the music director or one of the warden’s wives. The town’s chief of police—that’s novel. Not too bright, but novel.

a frigid night of an Italian winter, crimson flows through the veins of nature’s sweet orange, staining its flesh. Cold-pressing releases its addictive oil: tangy, warm, balsamic. Blends well with frankincense, cedar, and clove. And always transports me to Italy. —DB

He screamed and cried, as they tore into his flesh.

He veered toward them and charged full speed into the crowd. He began biting into any piece of flesh that was not covered by clothing.

Choose an idea that speaks to you, one that is borne of personal experience and authentic emotion; flesh it out so you know who the main character is, where it will take place, what the central conflict is, and its theme; use every single good idea that comes to you; and plan on writing this book to one person. Carry that powerful potion forward to the next four chapters, where I'm going to show you, step-by-step, how to transform it into a novel that heals. Chunk. Everything is going to fall into place. 1 I'm going to call him Dale here, to protect the guilty.

As long as I was alone, in off mode, I only needed enough fuel—not a feast—to get by. Once I hit the on button, my troubles would begin in earnest. I would have to deal with parents enslaved to a program, incapable of knowing me as a flesh-and-blood human being, have chummy conversations with coworkers, and otherwise explain myself to other people. I would constantly have to be me, and that would drive me crazy. I cherished the time I had to myself, since it was only then that I could chill out and stop being me—it’s impossible to truly switch off when other people are around.

If a man is willing to turn over control of his life to a drug, whether it’s alcohol, nicotine, or worse, he isn’t fit to be a leader. A leader must be above the temptations of the flesh. He must be better than that.

My favorite idea to come out of the world of cultured meat is the 'pig in the backyard.' I say 'favorite' not because this scenario seems likely to materialize but because it speaks most directly to my own imagination. In a city, a neighborhood contains a yard, and in that yard there is a pig, and that pig is relatively happy. It receives visitors every day, including local children who bring it odds and ends to eat from their family kitchens. These children may have played with the pig when it was small. Each week a small and harmless biopsy of cells is taken from the pig and turned into cultured pork, perhaps hundreds of pounds of it. This becomes the community's meat. The pig lives out a natural porcine span, and I assume it enjoys the company of other pigs from time to time. This fantasy comes to us from Dutch bioethicists, and it is based on a very real project in which Dutch neighbourhoods raised pigs and then debated the question of their eventual slaughter. The fact that the pig lives in a city is important, for the city is the ancient topos of utopian thought. The 'pig in the backyard' might also be described as the recurrence of an image from late medieval Europe that has been recorded in literature and art history. This is the pig in the land of Cockaigne, the 'Big Rock Candy Mountain' of its time, was a fantasy for starving peasants across Europe. It was filled with foods of a magnificence that only the starving can imagine. In some depictions, you reached this land by eating through a wall of porridge, on the other side of which all manner of things to eat and drink came up from the ground and flowed in streams. Pigs walked around with forks sticking out of backs that were already roasted and sliced. Cockaigne is an image of appetites fullfilled, and cultured meat is Cockaigne's cornucopian echo. The great difference is that Cockaigne was an inversion of the experience of the peasants who imagined it: a land where sloth became a virtue rather than a vice, food and sex were easily had, and no one ever had to work. In Cockaigne, delicious birds would fly into our mouths, already cooked. Animals would want to be eaten. By gratifying the body's appetites rather than rewarding the performance of moral virtue, Cockaigne inverted heaven. The 'pig in the backyard' does not fully eliminate pigs, with their cleverness and their shit, from the getting of pork. It combines intimacy, community, and an encounter with two kinds of difference: the familiar but largely forgotten difference carried by the gaze between human animal and nonhuman animal, and the weirder difference of an animal's body extended by tissue culture techniques. Because that is literally what culturing animal cells does, extending the body both in time and space, creating a novel form of relation between an original, still living animal and its flesh that becomes meat. The 'pig in the backyard' tries to please both hippies and techno-utopians at once, and this is part of this vision of rus in urbe. But this doubled encounter with difference also promises (that word again!) to work on the moral imagination. The materials for this work are, first, the intact living body of another being, which appears to have something like a telos of its own beyond providing for our sustenance; and second, a new set of possibilities for what meat can become in the twenty-first century. The 'pig in the backyard' is only a scenario. Its outcomes are uncertain. It is not obvious that the neighbourhood will want to eat flesh, even the extended and 'harmless' flesh, of a being they know well, but the history of slaughter and carnivory on farms suggests that they very well might. The 'pig in the backyard' is an experiment in ethical futures. The pig points her snout at us and asks what kind of persons we might become.

It seemed to me that Mr. Sculley understood the very nucleus of existence, that he had kept his young eyes and young heart even though his body had grown old. He saw straight through to the cosmic order of things, and he knew that life is not held only in flesh and bone, but also in those objects — a good, faithful pair of shoes; a reliable car; a pen that always works; a bike that has taken you many a mile — into which we put our trust and which give us back the security and joy of memories.

Although we do not currently have Jesus in the flesh with us face-to-face, we still have a God who longs to hear from us and a way to communicate with Him. Did you know that He really wants to hear from you? Your words can be jumbled, the tone wobbly. A prayer can be as short as a text or as long as a novel. You can voice your current aches and pains, your doubts and fears, or read Him the lyrics of a song you wrote. The content does not matter as much as the one producing it. God cares to hear from you, in your tone, from your heart, with your mannerisms and character and experiences, however knotted up they are. He knows that they’ll never get untangled unless you hand them over to Him, in all your heaviness and anguish. How can I be so sure? I know this because I have read the prayers of the man called “the one after God’s own heart” (1 Samuel 13:14, author’s paraphrase).

No, the love of a mother is more like lying lame before a stampede of charging horses. There is nothing to be done. And after everything you were has been pounded into the scorched earth, a battered heart is all that survives. Only now it is wrapped in another’s flesh. Soon, that heart will crawl, then walk, then run about you, vulnerable to the slings and spears of an indifferent world.

Dropping Goddard’s narrow black oxford, he wiped his hands on a cloth and ran nervous fingers through his hair. The others were leaving London this morning; by teatime the basement would be full of people and noise and activity. He had to talk to her, now. He just wasn’t sure what to say. Not the truth, obviously. He’d thought she might be useful in his search for answers, with her keys and her authority to move through the house. He’d seen her as a chess piece. And now he’d discovered that she was warm flesh and soft lips: a woman with a battered heart and bruised past and more courage than he could properly comprehend. A girl who had been hungry for life and eager for love, who had been manipulated by a man who had only thought of how useful she could be to him too. The shaving mirror on the bench showed a face that was grey tinged with fatigue. The bruising around his eye was a jaundiced yellow; he looked as seedy as he felt. He’d known he wasn’t worthy of her. He just hadn’t appreciated how much.

I washed her with slow, careful gestures, first letting her squat in the tub, then asking her to stand up: I still have in my ears the sound of the dripping water, and the impression that the copper of the tub had a consistency not different from Lila's flesh, which was smooth, solid, calm. I had a confusion of feelings and thoughts: embrace her, weep with her, kiss her, pull her hair, pretend to sexual experience and instruct her in a learned voice, distancing her with words just at the moment of greatest closeness. But in the end there was only the hostile thought that I was washing her, from her hair to the soles of her feet, early in the morning, just so Stefano could sully her in the course of the night. I imagined her naked as she was at that moment, entwined with her husband, in the bed in the new house, while the train clattered under their windows and his violent flesh entered her with a sharp blow, like the cork pushed by the palm into the neck of a wine bottle. And it suddenly seemed to me that the only remedy against the pain I was feeling, that I would feel, was to find a corner secluded enough so that Antonio could do to me, at the same time, the exact same thing.

As they turned it emerged under the white and flaring lamps. Translucent insides bubble-pocked and quivering, it slopped forward, across the road, toward the skeletons. Impaling itself on the bones, it flowed around them, covered them, molded to them. A final surge, and its shapelessness contracted into arms, head, legs. The naked man-thing pushed itself to its knees and then stood, its flesh now opaque. Eye sockets caved into the face. A mouth ripped low on the skull, and the chest began to move. A wet, steamy sound came from the mouth hole in regular gasps.

The sailor Johnson was swayed by idea, by principle, and truth, and sincerity. He was right, he knew he was right, and he was unafraid. He would die for the right if needs be, he would be true to himself, sincere with his soul. And in this was portrayed the victory of the spirit over the flesh, the indomitability and moral grandeur of the soul that knows no restriction and rises above time and space and matter with a surety and invincibleness born of nothing else than eternity and immortality.

Josiah said he could straighten the structure with the horses and reinforce the posts, but as he went into more detail, I stopped him. I said, please, Josiah. Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone, I trust you. I don’t need to hear more. As a younger woman, I often found myself bewildered by Josiah’s ability to carry on with practical concerns while rocked by affliction. I had come to see this as a gift from the Lord, perhaps a gift He gives to all men in greater abundance. For so long I’d misread Josiah’s steady calm, his ability to build things, to eat with a robust appetite, even to sleep soundly most nights, as indifference. But it is his own way of shouldering into hardship, like a sailor on deck in a gale, refusing, on principle, to turn his back to the howling wind.

But I have tried — I have tried — to make them understand the miracle the way I and Sister Caroline see it. That flesh is going to die, yes. It’s going to leave this world, and that’s the way life is. But I believe in the miracle that though flesh dies, the spirit does not. It goes on,

Family wasn’t only flesh and blood, though. Family was about who loved you and who built you up, not tore you down.

Dylan had never felt that way about anyone except for his own flesh and blood. And probably Blake. He supposed he'd put his toe in a flame if Blake had somehow ended up in danger and needed rescuing. But beyond that, he'd never cared about anyone else that deeply.

Men begin and end their lives as helpless lumps of flesh in the hands of women, and all the years between—power, success, wealth, fame, even victory in war—are merely a doomed attempt at escape.

Preparing myself (this was the word) seemed to me to have something ridiculous about it. All that struggle, all that time spent camouflaging myself when I could be doing something else. The colors that suited me, the ones that didn't, the styles that made me look thinner, those that made me fatter, the cut that flattered me, the one that didn't. A lengthy, costly preparation. Reducing myself to a table set for the sexual appetite of the male, to a well-cooked dish to make his mouth water. And then, the anguish of not succeeding. Of not seeming pretty. Of not managing to conceal with skill the vulgarity of the flesh with its moods and odors and imperfections.

The flesh and blood breaking off from a woman’s body remain linked to her forever.