Mary Lightly Quotes

Every life has death and every light has shadow. Be content to stand in the light and let the shadow fall where it will.

He is beauty, inside and out. He is the silver lining in a world of darkness. He is my light.

I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.

You try to walk in the light.

maybe death isn't darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us--

I can feel his presence here in every stone he has touched, every person he has lifted up, every street and alley and city that he has changed in the few years of his life, because he is the Republic, he is our light, and I love you, I love you, until the day we meet again I will hold you in my heart and protect you there, grieving what we never had, cherishing what we did. I wish you were here. I love you, always.

God Said: Let there be light! I said: Say please.

Love is a battle," said Marie-Claude, still smiling. "And I plan to go on fighting. To the end." Love is a battle?" said Franz. "Well, I don't feel at all like fighting." And he left.

Day, the boy from the streets with nothing except the clothes on his back and the earnestness in his eyes, owns my heart. He is beauty, inside and out. He is the silver lining in a world of darkness. He is my light.

A line comes back to Marie-Laure from Jules Verne: Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.

After a lifetime of darkness, I want to leave something behind that is made of light.

As we work to create light for others, we naturally light our own way.

Keep hoping to see the light in her eyes. Even knowing it'll mean she's saying good-bye.

But I also say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it's done right, is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive.

Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.

Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.

The boy who walks in the light

Knock-knock-knock No, that's not creepy at all. Being in a spaceship twelve light-years from home and having someone knock on the door is totally normal.

Although it may not seem like it, this isn’t a story about darkness. It’s about light. Kahlil Gibran says Your joy can fill you only as deeply your sorrow has carved you. If you’ve never tasted bitterness, sweet is just another pleasant flavor on your tongue. One day I’m going to hold a lot of joy.

Each day means a new twenty-four hours. Each day means everything’s possible again. You live in the moment, you die in the moment, you take it all one day at a time.” He looks toward the railway car’s open door, where streaks of dark water blanket the world. “You try to walk in the light.

You are a light,” she replies gently. “And when you shine, you shine bright.

When I find myself in times of trouble, mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be. And in my hour of darkness she is standing right in front of me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be. Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be. Whisper words of wisdom, let it be. And when the broken hearted people living in the world agree, there will be an answer, let it be. For though they may be parted there is still a chance that they will see, there will be an answer. let it be. Let it be, let it be, ..... And when the night is cloudy, there is still a light, that shines on me, shine until tomorrow, let it be. I wake up to the sound of music, mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be. Let it be, let it be, .....

The Poet With His Face In His Hands You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn’t need anymore of that sound. So if you’re going to do it and can’t stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t hold it in, at least go by yourself across the forty fields and the forty dark inclines of rocks and water to the place where the falls are flinging out their white sheets like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that jubilation and water fun and you can stand there, under it, and roar all you want and nothing will be disturbed; you can drip with despair all afternoon and still, on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched by the passing foil of the water, the thrush, puffing out its spotted breast, will sing of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

Day just smiles at me, an expression so sad that it breaks through my numbness, and I begin to cry. Those bright blue eyes. Before me is the boy who has bandaged my wounds on the streets of Lake, who has guarded his family with every bone in his body, who has stayed by my side in spite of everything, the boy of light and laughter and life, of grief and fury and passion, the boy whose fate is intertwined with mine, forever and always. "I love you," he whispers. "Can you stay awhile?

What did they do to you, Kazi?” His voice was low, earnest. Even in the dim light, I was able to see the worry in his eyes. I pretended I didn’t know what he was talking about. “Who did what?” “Who made you afraid of an open world? An open sky? Was it Venda? Your parents?” “No one did anything,” I answered quietly. “Then hold on to me,” he said. “Let me show you the stars.

Why I Wake Early Hello, sun in my face. Hello, you who made the morning and spread it over the fields and into the faces of the tulips and the nodding morning glories, and into the windows of, even, the miserable and the crotchety – best preacher that ever was, dear star, that just happens to be where you are in the universe to keep us from ever-darkness, to ease us with warm touching, to hold us in the great hands of light – good morning, good morning, good morning. Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.

In Blackwater Woods Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment, the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders of the ponds, and every pond, no matter what its name is, is nameless now. Every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know. To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

If only life were like a Jules Verne novel, thinks Marie-Laure, and you could page ahead when you most needed to, and learn what would happen.

I trust you all slept well,” I said, deliberately keeping my tone light. I returned Malich’s glare with a tight-lipped grin. “Yes, we did,” Kaden answered quickly. “I’m sorry to hear that.

There are only shades of gray. Black and white are nothing more than lofty ideals in our minds, the standards by which we try to judge things, and map out our place in the world in relevance to them. Good and evil, in their purest form, are as intangible and forever beyond our ability to hold in our hand as any Fae illusion. We can only aim at them, aspire to them, and hope not to get so lost in the shadows that we can no longer aim for the light.

I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.

Adam retreated to sit beside Mary as Ronan stretched out on the pew, rubbing out the dingy plan with the legs of his jeans. Something about his stillness on the pew and the funereal quality of the light reminded Adam of the effigy of Glendower they'd seen at the tomb. A king, sleeping. Adam couldn't imagine, though, the strange, wild kingdom that Ronan might rule. "Stop watching me," Ronan said, though his eyes were closed.

Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled— to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world. I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery. I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing— that the light is everything—that it is more than the sum of each flawed blossom rising and falling. And I do.

Love Sorrow Love sorrow. She is yours now, and you must take care of what has been given. Brush her hair, help her into her little coat, hold her hand, especially when crossing a street. For, think, what if you should lose her? Then you would be sorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessness would be yours. Take care, touch her forehead that she feel herself not so utterly alone. And smile, that she does not altogether forget the world before the lesson. Have patience in abundance. And do not ever lie or ever leave her even for a moment by herself, which is to say, possibly, again, abandoned. She is strange, mute, difficult, sometimes unmanageable but, remember, she is a child. And amazing things can happen. And you may see, as the two of you go walking together in the morning light, how little by little she relaxes; she looks about her; she begins to grow.

I took an oath June. I am still bound by that oath. I will die with honor for sacrificing everything I have-everything-for my country.. And yet, Day is a legend, while I am to be executed." His voice finally breaks with all his anger and inner torment, the injustice he feels. "It makes no sense." I stand up. Behind me, guards move toward the cell door. "You're wrong," I say sadly. "It makes perfect sense." "Why?" "Because Day chose to walk in the light." I turn my back on him for the last time. The door opens; the cell's bars make way for the hall, a new rotation of prison guards, freedom. "And so did Metias.

When the world is murky, guide yourself with your own steady light.

And yet she can tell he is visited by fears so immense, so multiple, that she can almost feel the terror pulsing inside him. As though some beast breathes all the time at the windowpanes of his mind.

Do you know what happens, Etienne,” says Madame Manec from the other side of the kitchen, “when you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water?” “You will tell us, I am sure.” “It jumps out. But do you know what happens when you put the frog in a pot of cool water and then slowly bring it to a boil? You know what happens then?” Marie-Laure waits. The potatoes steam. Madame Manec says, “The frog cooks.

They were the flash of light in a stormy sky, the fleeting darkness before dawn. Never have they existed before, nor shall they ever exist again.

A Thousand Mornings All night my heart makes its way however it can over the rough ground of uncertainties, but only until night meets and then is overwhelmed by morning, the light deepening, the wind easing and just waiting, as I too wait (and when have I ever been disappointed?) for redbird to sing

Then he crouches down behind it, motions for Tess and me to sit down, and begins unbuttoning his vest. I blush scarlet and thank every god in the world for the darkness surrounding us. “I’m not cold and I’m not bleeding,” I say to him. “Keep your clothes on.” The boy looks at me. I would’ve expected his bright eyes to look dimmer in the night, but instead they seem to reflect the light coming from the windows above us. He’s amused. “Who said anything about you , sweetheart?

Being nearly naked around Barrons felt a lot like going to a shark convention lightly basted in blood.

The boy who walks in the light. The girl who shatters the shining glass.

I reach out to touch one of the walls, imagining that I can feel his life and warmth through it, and I look around again, up toward the rooftops and then all the way to the night sky where a few faint stars can be seen, and there I think I really can see him. I can feel his presence here in every stone he has touched, every person he has lifted up, every street and alley and city that he has changed in the few years of his life, because he is the Republic, he is our light, and I love you, I love you, until the day we meet again I will hold you in my heart and protect you there, grieving what we never had, cherishing what we did. I wish you were here. I love you, always.

You’re fucking kidding me, right?” “I don’t kid about fucking.

She was the flint lighting sparks in my darkness, illuminating a history that I can just barely see.

On the beach, at dawn: Four small stones clearly Hugging each other. How many kinds of love Might there be in the world, And how many formations might they make And who am I ever To imagine I could know Such a marvelous business? When the sun broke It poured willingly its light Over the stones That did not move, not at all, Just as, to its always generous term, It shed its light on me, My own body that loves, Equally, to hug another body.

Remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You are my creator, but I am your master;--obey!

I kept it to remind me that although there is evil, there is sometimes beauty and light. You, Jillian. You were always my light.

EVERY DOG’S STORY I have a bed, my very own. It’s just my size. And sometimes I like to sleep alone with dreams inside my eyes. But sometimes dreams are dark and wild and creepy and I wake and am afraid, though I don’t know why. But I’m no longer sleepy and too slowly the hours go by. So I climb on the bed where the light of the moon is shining on your face and I know it will be morning soon. Everybody needs a safe place.

You have goodness in your heart, but your darkness overwhelms it all; your desire to hurt, destroy, and avenge is more powerful than your desire to love, help, and light the way.

He was powerless because he had no precise desire, and this tortured him because he was vainly seeking something to desire. He could not even make himself stretch out his hand to switch on the light. The simple transition from intention to action seemed an unimaginable miracle.

In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

You are so full of light,” I say after a moment. “You align with joy, and I with fear and fury. If you could see into my thoughts, you would surely turn away. So why would you stay with me, even if return to Kenettra and resume our lives?” “You paint me as a saint,” he murmurs. “But I aligned with greed solely to prevent that.” Even now, he can make my lips twitch with a smile. “I’m serious, Magiano.” “As am I. None of us are saints. I have seen your darkness, yes, and know your struggle. I won’t deny it.” He touches my chin with one hand. At this gesture, the whispers seem to settle, pushed away where I can’t hear them. “But you are also passionate and ambitious and loyal. You are a thousand things, mi Adelinetta, not just one. Do not reduce yourself to that.

To the boys who get called girls, the girls who get called boys, and those who live outside these words. To those called names, and those searching for names of their own. To those who live on the edges, and in the spaces in between. I wish for you every light in the sky.

To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air. Marie-Laure can sit in an attic high above the street and hear lilies rustling in marshes two miles away. She hears Americans scurry across farm fields, directing their huge cannons at the smoke of Saint-Malo; she hears families sniffling around hurricane lamps in cellars, crows hopping from pile to pile, flies landing on corpses in ditches; she hears the tamarinds shiver and the jays shriek and the dune grass burn; she feels the great granite fist, sunk deep into the earth’s crust, on which Saint-Malo sits, and the ocean teething at it from all four sides, and the outer islands holding steady against the swirling tides; she hears cows drink from stone troughs and dolphins rise through the green water of the Channel; she hears the bones of dead whales stir five leagues below, their marrow offering a century of food for cities of creatures who will live their whole lives and never once see a photon sent from the sun. She hears her snails in the grotto drag their bodies over the rocks.

Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done, to have advanced true friends?" It isn't. I hope, wherever she is, she has that in her mind.

And if we know how to light a fire, why do we carry tinder around with us?" Because you're humans," the little one explained serenly. "You're stupid.

Life's not linear at all. It happens in lighting flashes. So fast you don't see those lay-you-out cold moments coming at you until you're Wile E. Coyote, steamrolled flat as a pancake by the Road Runner, victim of your own elaborate schemes.

There exists indeed an opposition to it [building of UVA, Jefferson's secular college] by the friends of William and Mary, which is not strong. The most restive is that of the priests of the different religious sects, who dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of day-light; and scowl on it the fatal harbinger announcing the subversion of the duperies on which they live. In this the Presbyterian clergy take the lead. The tocsin is sounded in all their pulpits, and the first alarm denounced is against the particular creed of Doctr. Cooper; and as impudently denounced as if they really knew what it is. [Letter to José Francesco Corrê a Da Serra - Monticello, April 11, 1820]

Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.

There is only one question: how to love this world.

I want a world where everything lights up because I'm in it

And I understood that if I kept it all up... no one would know me. A dim light far in the distance? No. To love -- I had to be there. I had to be there to be loved.

Barrons Books and Baubles had been ransacked! Tables were overturned, books torn from shelves and strewn everywhere, baubles broken. Even my little TV behind the counter had been destroyed. "Barrons?" I called warily. It was night and the lights were on. My illusory Alina had told me more than an hour had passed. Was it the same night, nearly dawn? Or was it the night following our theft attempt? Had Barrons come back from Wales yet? Or was he still there, searching for me? When I‘d been so rudely ripped from reality, who or what had come through those basement doors? I heard footsteps, boots on hardwood, and turned expectantly toward the connecting doors. Barrons was framed in the doorway. His eyes were black ice. He stared at me a moment, raking me from head to toe. "Nice tan, Ms. Lane. So, where the fuck have you been for the past month?

Sleeping In The Forest I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.

But soon," he cried, with sad and solemn enthusiasm, "I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pyre triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace, or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.

Watching my parents I've learnt a lesson many do not recognize. True love is not signaled by romantic, candle light dinners, red roses glistening with dew, or even Valentine's day celebrations. While these things may accompany our feelings, love is truly more than all those! Love is being with your spouse even when its not pleasing. Sometimes, love is walking down the hall, with your spouse hanging onto your shoulders and walking at a turtle's pace down the hall, just because surgery made life a burden. Love is patient, love is kind, love is Jesus! May we always remember love is not always tied in bows!

Because Day chose to walk in the light.” I turn my back on him for the last time. The door opens; the cell’s bars make way for the hall, a new rotation of prison guards, freedom. “And so did Metias.

Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light. It was what I was born for– to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world (from, 'Mindful')

how could there be a day in your whole life that doesn’t have its splash of happiness?

Day appears again. This time he leans in close enough for his hair to brush, light as silk, against my cheeks. He pulls me towards for a long kiss. The scene vanishes, replaced abruptly by a stormy night and Day struggling through the rain, blood dripping from his leg and leaving a trail behind him. He collapses onto his knees in front of Razor before the whole scene disappears again.

Marie-Laure smiles, and he laughs a pure, contagious laugh, one she will try to remember all her life, father and daughter turning in circles on the sidewalk in front of their apartment house, laughing together while snow sifts through the branches above.

Lightly, caressingly, Marie Antoinette picked up the crown as a gift. She was still too young to know that life never gives anything for nothing, and that a price is always exacted for what fate bestows. She did not think she would have to pay a price. She simply accepted the rights of her royal position and performed no duties in exchange. She wanted to combine two things which are, in actual human experience, incompatible; she wanted to reign and at the same time to enjoy.

God has the flashlight, let Him LIGHT the way!

I trembled, and my heart failed within me; when, on looking up, I saw, by the light of the moon, the daemon at the casement.

It's strange," I say to Day later, as we both curl up on the floor. Outside, the hurricane rages on. In a few hours we'll need to head out. "It's strange being here with you. I hardly know you. But...sometimes it feels like we're the same person born into two different worlds." He stays quiet for a moment, one hand absently playing with my hair. "I wonder what we would've been like if I'd been born into a life more like yours,and you had been born into mine. Would we be just like we are now? Would I be one of the Republic's top soldiers? And would you be a famous criminal?" I lift my head off his shoulder and look at him. "I never did ask you about your street name.Why 'Day'?" "Each day means a new twenty-four hours. Each day means everything's possible again.You live in the moment, you die in the moment,you take it all one day at a time." He looks toward the railway car's open door, where streaks of dark water blanket the world. "You try to walk in the light.

Remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You are my creator, but I am your master--obey!

For me it was important to be alone; solitude was a prerequisite to being openly and joyfully susceptible and responsive to the world of leaves, light, birdsong, flowers, flowing water.

How heron comes It is a negligence of the mind not to notice how at dusk heron comes to the pond and stands there in his death robes, perfect servant of the system, hungry, his eyes full of attention, his wings pure light

Said the man to the sun, “How I wish you could shine your light on every day of my life!” Said the sun to the man, “But only with the rain and the night could you recognize my light.” —Domaccan poem, translated by Chevalle

I am nothing, yes; I am air and darkness, a word, a promise. I watch in the crystal and I wait in the hollow hills. But out there in the light I have a young king and a bright sword to do my work for me, and build what will stand when my name is only a word for forgotten songs and outworn wisdom, and when your name, Morgause, is only a hissing in the dark.

Did you really think there was any version of me you could create, in any reality, in any universe that would not—first, foremost, and forever—be loyal to MacKayla Lane?

How about peaches, dear?” murmurs Madame Manec, and Marie-Laure can hear a can opening, juice slopping into a bowl. Seconds later, she’s eating wedges of wet sunlight.

What may not be expected in a country of eternal light

You drive me insane, June,” he murmurs against my hair. “You’re the scariest, most clever, bravest person I know, and sometimes I can’t catch my breath because I’m trying so hard to keep up. There will never be another like you. You realize that, don’t you?” I tilt my face up to see him. His eyes reflect the faint lights from the JumboTrons, a rainbow of evening colors. “Billions of people will come and go in this world,” he says softly, “but there will never be another like you.

It was hard to live through the early 1940s in France and not have the war be the center from which the rest of your life spiraled. Marie-Laure still cannot wear shoes that are too large, or smell a boiled turnip, without experiencing revulsion. Neither can she listen to lists of names. Soccer team rosters, citations at the end of journals, introductions at faculty meetings – always they seem to her some vestige of the prison lists that never contained her father’s name.

Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment, the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders of the ponds, and every pond, no matter what its name is, is nameless now. Every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know. To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

She's not much taller than Tess and definitely lighter than Kaede. For a second it seems like the crowd's attention has made her umcomfortable and I'm ready to dismiss her as a real contender until I study her again. No, this girl is nothing like the last one. She's hesitating not because she's afraid to fight,or because she fears losing,but because she's thinking. Calculating.She has dark hair tied back in a high ponytail and a lean, athletic build. She stands deliberately, with a hand resting on her hip, as if nothing in the world can catch her off guard. I find myself pausing to admire her face. For a brief moment,I'm lost to my surroundings. The girl shakes her head at Kaede. This surprises me too-I've never seen anyone refuse to fight. Everyone knows the rules: if you're chosen,you fight. This girl doesn't seem to fear the crowds wrath. Kaede laughs at her and says something I can't quite make out. Tess hears it,though, and casts me a quick, concerned glance. This time the girl nods. The crowd lets out another cheer,and Kaede smiles. I lean a little bit out from behind the chimney. Something about this girl...I don't know what it is.But her eyes burn in the light,and although it's hot and might be my imagination, I think I see a small smile on the girl's face. Tess shoots a questioning look at me.I hesitate for a split second,then hold up one finger again. I'm grateful to this mystery girl for helping Tess out, but with my money on the line,I decide to play it safe. Tess nods,then casts our bet in favor of Kaede. But the instant the new girl steps into the circle and I see her stance...I know I've made a big mistake.Kaede strikes like a bull, a battering ram. This girl strikes like a viper.

It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt.

Music made her feel as if she were holding a lamp that cast a halo of light around her, and while she knew there were people and responsibilities in the darkness beyond it, she couldn't see them. The flame of what she felt when she played made her deliciously blind.

The cup of life was poisoned forever, and although the sun shone upon me, as upon the happy and gay of heart, I saw around me nothing but a dense and frightful darkness, penetrated by no light but the glimmer of two eyes that glared upon me.

Music made her feel as if she were holding a lamp that cast a halo of light around her,

I told him that I believe all things in nature bear the mark of their Maker. The eagle, the owl, and the wind. We sat silently for a long moment, understanding that we are not so different really.

When I Am Among the Trees" When I am among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness. I would almost say that they save me, and daily. I am so distant from the hope of myself, in which I have goodness, and discernment, and never hurry through the world but walk slowly, and bow often. Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, “Stay awhile.” The light flows from their branches. And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say, “and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.

Light is a funny thing. Its wavelength defines what it can and can’t interact with. Anything smaller than the wavelength is functionally nonexistent to that photon. That’s why there’s a mesh over the window of a microwave. The holes in the mesh are too small for microwaves to pass through. But visible light, with a much shorter wavelength, can go through freely. So you get to watch your food cook without melting your face off.

Dani, Dani, Dani." I flinch. I've never heard anyone say my name so gently. It creeps me all kinds of out. He's towering over me, arms crossed over his chest, scarred forearms dark against the rolled-up sleeves of a crisp white shirt. Heavy silver cuffs glint at both wrists. The light is smack behind his head, as usual. "You didn't really think I'd let you get away with it," Ryodan says.

Walk in the light.

Fuck you!” “Right here?” He crossed his arms. “That definitely wouldn’t help your getting over me.

This isn’t going to be a cute little storybook you can close when you’re done. You open this and you’re going to be letting things out you cannot possibly imagine. And believe me when I tell you this is no fairytale.”–Eli (Darkness Of Light)

I told you I didn't have a heart. I do have one. I just didn't know it until I met you. You are my light. My soul craves you, and I love you with every ounce of the heart you've awakened in me. I...I could live without you but I wouldn't want to. Will you marry me, Evelyn Marie?

He was the last thread suspending me in the light. Without him, I can feel myself spiraling downward, falling to a place where I can no longer pull myself back up.

If darkness surrounds you, look for the light. If you can't see it, raise your head up. You may be surrounded by darkness but it does not cover you on top. Let the light shine down on you and let it lead the way out of darkness.

German sailors sing a drunken song in the street, and a house spider over the stove spins a new web every night, and to Marie-Laure this is a double cruelty: that everything else keeps living, that the spinning earth does not pause for even an instant in its trip around the sun.

Then it happened that whenever he began to see Mari's [Mary Magdalene] passionate enthusiasm, her eyes emanating a light that amply showed how contended she was aiding so many people, Jesus could not help but be proud of his most-beloved disciple. Mari, likewise, felt indebted and grateful to Jesus as she saw her fellow sisters gradually being saved on all counts, some even going on to become some of Jesus's staunchest disciples...

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river? Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air - An armful of white blossoms, A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies, Biting the air with its black beak? Did you hear it, fluting and whistling A shrill dark music - like the rain pelting the trees - like a waterfall Knifing down the black ledges? And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds - A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river? And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything? And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for? And have you changed your life?

To everyone stuck in a room void of light – Be brave enough to open the blinds. There is a world full of colour beyond the walls of your mind.

She beat lightly on his chest with her fists. "I want a partner, not a protector." "Can't I be both?" "You're enormously exasperating sometimes, do you know that?" He grinned. "And you love me anyway.

Where are you? Touch me.” I slip my hand into his, and for a moment he just stands there, looking down at where I am, then he closes his eyes and laces strong fingers with mine. I hear exactly what he’s not saying in them: You better bring your ass back to me, woman. I reply with mine, Always. He laughs softly then somehow finds my face and kisses me, light and fast, and I taste him on my lips, need him again, hard and fast and soon.

If your going to be a jackass then do it outside of your home, as your home is supposed to be a place of love and safety, it's your sanctuary from the outside world. The only place where we can truly be accepted.

We’re a very cousiny people,” Mary Harty told me. “One must tread very lightly here: Everyone is kin to everyone else.

A poem should always have birds in it.

I just worry you may pay too much attention to what you’re running from to see what you’re running to.

In the jaundiced light of a streetlamp, Sarina realizes why people have children: to see the face of the one they love at the ages they’ve missed...

People dealing with trauma and depression don’t magically get better overnight. It’s not like in the movies, Mary. There’s no magic reset button at rock-bottom.

When I woke the morning light was just slipping in front of the stars and I was covered with blossoms.

A bright light at the end of a tunnel can seem warm and inviting, or it can seem mysterious and terrifying. People of the world "all working on their arts and crafts" can seem like heaven or, if you're me, hell.

I wanted you, nameless Woman of the South, No wraith, but utterly—as still more alone The Southern Cross takes night And lifts her girdles from her, one by one— High, cool, wide from the slowly smoldering fire Of lower heavens,— vaporous scars! Eve! Magdalene! or Mary, you? Whatever call—falls vainly on the wave. O simian Venus, homeless Eve, Unwedded, stumbling gardenless to grieve Windswept guitars on lonely decks forever; Finally to answer all within one grave! And this long wake of phosphor, iridescent Furrow of all our travel—trailed derision! Eyes crumble at its kiss. Its long-drawn spell Incites a yell. Slid on that backward vision The mind is churned to spittle, whispering hell. I wanted you . . . The embers of the Cross Climbed by aslant and huddling aromatically. It is blood to remember; it is fire To stammer back . . . It is God—your namelessness. And the wash— All night the water combed you with black Insolence. You crept out simmering, accomplished. Water rattled that stinging coil, your Rehearsed hair—docile, alas, from many arms. Yes, Eve—wraith of my unloved seed! The Cross, a phantom, buckled—dropped below the dawn. Light drowned the lithic trillions of your spawn.

Shall each man," cried he, "find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone? I had feelings of affection, and they were requited by detestation and scorn. Man! You may hate, but beware! Your hours will pass in dread and misery, and soon the bolt will fall which must ravish from you your happiness forever. Are you to be happy while I grovel in the intensity of my wretchedness? You can blast my other passions, but revenge remains—revenge, henceforth dearer than light or food! I may die, but first you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery. Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful. I will watch with the wiliness of a snake, that I may sting with its venom. Man, you shall repent of the injuries you inflict.

Adelina, stop.” It is Magiano. Magiano. Stop. The name is a small light, but it is there, and I cling to it in the maelstrom around me. I falter as he reaches me and pulls me into a rough embrace. “He didn’t kill her,” Magiano is whispering. “Stop. Stop.” His hand cradles the back of my head.

DAISIES It is possible, I suppose that sometime we will learn everything there is to learn: what the world is, for example, and what it means. I think this as I am crossing from one field to another, in summer, and the mockingbird is mocking me, as one who either knows enough already or knows enough to be perfectly content not knowing. Song being born of quest he knows this: he must turn silent were he suddenly assaulted with answers. Instead oh hear his wild, caustic, tender warbling ceaselessly unanswered. At my feet the white-petalled daisies display the small suns of their center piece, their -- if you don't mind my saying so -- their hearts. Of course I could be wrong, perhaps their hearts are pale and narrow and hidden in the roots. What do I know? But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given, to see what is plain; what the sun lights up willingly; for example -- I think this as I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch -- the suitability of the field for the daisies, and the daisies for the field.

Kestrel's eyes slipped shut. She faded in and out of sleep. When Arin spoke again, she wasn't sure whether he expected her to to hear him. 'I remember sitting with my mother in a carriage.' There was a long pause. Then Arin's voice came again in that slow, fluid way that showed the singer in him. 'In my memory, I am small and sleepy, and she is doing something strange. Every time the carriage turns into the sun, she raises her hand as if reaching for something. The light lines her fingers with fire. Then the carriage passes through shadows, and her hand falls. Again sunlight beams through the window, and again her hand lifts. It becomes and eclipse.' Kestrel listened, and it was as if the story itself was an eclipse, drawing its darkness over her. 'Just before I fell asleep,' he said, 'I realized that she was shading my eyes from the sun.' She heard Arin shift, felt him look at her. 'Kestrel.' She imagined how he would sit, lean forward. How he would look in the glow of the carriage lantern. 'Survival isn't wrong. You can sell your honor in small ways, so long as you guard yourself. You can pour a glass of wine like it's meant to be poured, and watch a man drink, and plot your revenge.' Perhaps his head tilted slightly at this. 'You probably plot even in your sleep.' There was a silence as long as a smile. 'Plot away, Kestrel. Survive. If I hadn't lived, no one would remember my mother, not like I do.' Kestrel could no longer deny sleep. It pulled her under. 'And I would never have met you.

Holy shit! Can we say unstable? Was I the only sane one around here? Well, I guess that really wasn’t setting the standard very high." -Ember, Darkness Of Light

light bright shining

By the way, don’t you think shoving a light bulb up baby Jesus’ butt and plugging it in is just a little sacrilegious?

Donald’s need for affirmation is so great that he doesn’t seem to notice that the largest group of his supporters are people he wouldn’t condescend to be seen with outside of a rally. His deep-seated insecurities have created in him a black hole of need that constantly requires the light of compliments that disappears as soon as he’s soaked it in. Nothing is ever enough.

Barrons stood inside the front door, dripping cool old-world elegance. I hadn’t heard him come in over the music. He was leaning, shoulder against the wall, arms folded, watching me. “ ‘One eye is taken for an eye . . .’ ” I trailed off, deflating. I didn’t need a mirror to know how stupid I looked. I regarded him sourly for a moment, then moved for the sound dock to turn it off. When I heard a choked sound behind me I spun, and shot him a hostile glare. He wore his usual expression of arrogance and boredom. I resumed my path for the sound dock, and heard it again. This time when I turned back, the corners of his mouth were twitching. I stared at him until they stopped. I’d reached the sound dock, and just turned it off, when he exploded. I whirled. “I didn’t look that funny,” I snapped. His shoulders shook. “Oh, come on! Stop it!” He cleared his throat and stopped laughing. Then his gaze took a quick dart upward, fixed on my blazing MacHalo, and he lost it again. I don’t know, maybe it was the brackets sticking out from the sides. Or maybe I should have gotten a black bike helmet, not a hot pink one. I unfastened it and yanked it off my head. I stomped over to the door, flipped the interior lights back on, slammed him in the chest with my brilliant invention, and stomped upstairs. “You’d better have stopped laughing by the time I come back down,” I shouted over my shoulder. I wasn’t sure he even heard me, he was laughing so hard.

It’s a little early in our relationship for us to be ‘surmounting,’ but, hey, I’m game if you are. I’ll even let you be on top.” He looked directly at me, a coy smile playing on his lips.

Into this error men have, probably, been led by viewing education in a false light; not considering it as the first step to form a being advancing gradually towards perfection; but only as a preparation for life.

This is, I think, what holiness is: the natural world, where every moment is full of the passion to keep moving. Inside every mind there’s a hermit’s cave full of light, full of snow, full of concentration. I’ve knelt there, and so have you, hanging on to what you love, to what is lovely. Mary Oliver, At the Lake

You're my sunshine, my rain and my evening stars I feel as though I was living in the shadows and you have entered my life in a blaze of color and light which as illuminated my very existence.

Night-time train travel is wonderful again! No standing in the corridors for hours, no being shunted off for a troop train to pass, and above all, no black-out curtains. All the windows we passed were lighted, and I could snoop once more. I missed it so terribly during the war. I felt as if we had all turned into moles scuttling along in our separate tunnels. I don't consider myself a real peeper-they go in for bedrooms, but it's families in sitting rooms or kitchens that thrill me. I can imagine their entire lives from a glimpse of bookshelves, or desks, or lit candles, or bright sofa cushions.

I was thankful that nobody was there to meet me at the airport. We reached Paris just as the light was fading. It had been a soft, gray March day, with the smell of spring in the air. The wet tarmac glistened underfoot; over the airfield the sky looked very high, rinsed by the afternoon's rain to a pale clear blue. Little trails of soft cloud drifted in the wet wind, and a late sunbeam touched them with a fleeting underglow. Away beyond the airport buildings the telegraph wires swooped gleaming above the road where passing vehicles showed lights already.

Starlings in Winter I feel my boots trying to leave the ground, I feel my heart pumping hard. I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.

Feast upon your enemies to give you life. This, too, shall give me mine as I savor the destruction of flesh and blood off the children of the Light. Their souls will cry out to me, my own soul singing with its tune until one day the true power of my Realm will exist in all dimensions.

I see the first flicker of warmth in his eyes, and I understand something then. At some point, if I continued using dark power and went fully dark— I’d join you in hell. Black eyes flash crimson. And I’d prefer not to. So, toe the motherfucking line, and don’t make me cross it, Ms. Lane.

Francie went over to stand at the great window from which she could see the East River twenty stories below. It was the last time she'd see the river from that window. The last time of anything has the poignancy of death itself. This that I see now, she thought, to see no more this way. Oh, the last time how clearly you see everything; as though a magnifying light had been turned on it. And you grieve because you hadn't held it tighter when you had it every day. What had granma Mary Rommely said? "To look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done?

Lua and Marie are holding hands. They look like they’re so happy, just inside this moment, watching the kids and the lights on their old fibro house. Lua kisses her. Just softly on the lips. And she kisses back. Sometimes people are beautiful. Not in looks. Not in what they say. Just in what they are.

Everywhere I looked, I could see only shades of gray. Black and white were nothing more than lofty ideals in our minds, the standards by which we tried to judge things and map out our place in the world in relevance to them. Good and evil, in their purest form, were as intangible and forever beyond our ability to hold in our hand as any Fae illusion. We could only aim at them, aspire to them, and hope not to get so lost in the shadows that we could no longer see the light.

Poem (the spirit likes to dress up) The spirit likes to dress up like this: ten fingers, ten toes, shoulders, and all the rest at night in the black branches, in the morning in the blue branches of the world. It could float, of course, but would rather plumb rough matter. Airy and shapeless thing, it needs the metaphor of the body, lime and appetite, the oceanic fluids; it needs the body’s world, instinct and imagination and the dark hug of time, sweetness and tangibility, to be understood, to be more than pure light that burns where no one is – so it enters us – in the morning shines from brute comfort like a stitch of lightning; and at night lights up the deep and wondrous drownings of the body like a star.

Lightly, caressingly, Marie Antoinette picked up the crown as a gift. She was still too young to know that life never gives anything for nothing, and that a price is always exacted for what fate bestows. She did not think she would have to pay a price.

People walk the paths of the gardens below, and the wind sings anthems in the hedges, and the big old cedars at the entrance to the maze creak. Marie-Laure imagines the electromagnetic waves traveling into and out of Michel’s machine, bending around them, just as Etienne used to describe, except now a thousand times more crisscross the air than when he lived - maybe a million times more. Torrents of text conversations, tides of cell conversations, of televisions programs, of e-mails, vast networks of fiber and wire interlaced above and beneath the city, passing through buildings, arcing between transmitters in Metro tunnels, between antennas atop buildings, from lampposts with cellular transmitters in them, commercials for Carrefour and Evian and prebaked toaster pastries flashing into space and back to earth again, I am going to be late and Maybe we should get reservations? and Pick up avocados and What did he say? and ten thousand I miss yous, fifty thousand I love yous, hate mail and appointment reminders and market updates, jewelry ads, coffee ads, furniture ads flying invisibly over the warrens of Paris, over the battlefields and tombs, over the Ardennes, over the Rhine, over Belgium and Denmark, over the scarred and ever-shifting landscape we call nations. And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it. Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.

It looked like she held a basketful of woven gold. Arin leap down the stairs. He strode up to his cousin and seized her arm. “Arin!” “What did you do?” Sarsine jerked away. “What she wanted. Pull yourself together.” But Arin only saw Kestrel as she had been last night before the ball. How her hair had been a spill of low light over his palms. He had threaded desire into those braids, had wanted her to sense it even as he dreaded that she would. He had met her eyes in the mirror, and didn’t know, couldn’t tell her feelings. He only knew the fire of his own. “It’s just hair,” Sarsine said. “It will grow back.” “Yes,” said Arin, “but no everything does.

I don't know why I pause to watch Raffaele. Perhaps I have always done so, so captivated am I by his beauty. Even now, in the midst of death and destruction, he moves with the grace of someone not of this world. His attention is focused entirely on Enzo. The sight breaks my heart, and a small, lost part of me sparks with light.

Holmes had cultivated the ability to still the noise of the mind, by smoking his pipe and playing nontunes on the violin. He once compared this mental state with the sort of passive seeing that enables the eye, in a dim light or at a great distance, to grasp details with greater clarity by focusing slightly to one side of the object of interest. When active, strained vision only obscures and frustrates, looking away often permits the eyes to see and interpret the shapes of what it sees. Thus does inattention allow the mind to register the still, small whisper of the daughter of the voice.

With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

I thought: maybe death isn’t darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us— as soft as feathers— that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking, and shut our eyes, not without amazement, and let ourselves be carried, as through the translucence of mica, to the river that is without the least dapple or shadow— that is nothing but light—scalding, aortal light— in which we are washed and washed out of our bones.--White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field

Singing in the midst of evil is what it means to be disciples. Like Mary Magdalene, the reason we stand and weep and listen for Jesus is because we, like Mary, are bearers of resurrection, we are made new. On the third day, Jesus rose again, and we do not need to be afraid. To sing to God amidst sorrow is to defiantly proclaim, like Mary Magdalene did to the apostles, and like my friend Don did at Dylan Klebold's funeral,t hat death is not the final word. To defiantly say, once again, that a light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot, will not, shall not overcome it. And so, evil be damned, because even as we go to the grave, we still make our song alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia.

In its mythology, Mithra, the Persian god of light and wisdom, was born of a virgin in a cave on the 25th December and later, as an adult, undertook long voyages for the purposes of illuminating mankind. His disciples were twelve; he was betrayed, sentenced to death, and after his death, he was buried in a tomb from which he rose from the dead. The Mithrian religion also states that at the end of all time, Mithra will come again to judge the living and the dead. In this religious cult, Mithra was called the Saviour and he was sometimes illustrated as a lamb. Its doctrine included baptism, the sacramental meal (the Eucharist), and the belief in a saviour god that died and rose from the dead to be the mediator between God and mankind. The adherents of this religion believed in the resurrection of the body, universal judgement, and therefore in heaven and hell.

What sort of man could you love for a lifetime?" he asked her. She was silent for a while. He guessed that she was considering her answer. "A kind man," she said. "When we are young and foolish we do not realize how essential a component of love kindness is. It is perhaps the most important quality. And an honorable man. Always doing the right thing no matter what." His heart sank-on both account. "And a strong man," she said. "Strong enough to be vulnerable, to take risks, to be honest even when honesty might expose him to ridicule or rejection. And someone who would put himself at the center of my world even before knowing that I would be willing to do the same for him. A man foolish and brave enough to tell me that he loves me even when I have hidden all signs that I love him in return." "Eve-" he said. "He would have to be tall and broad and dark and hook-nosed," she said. "And frowning much of the time, pretending he is tough and impervious to all the finer emotions. And then smiling occasionally to light up my heart and my life." Good God! "He would have to be you," she said. "no one else would do. Which is just as well, considering the fact that I am married to you...

Mary awoke from her nightmare with a pounding heart, convinced that she had only imagined Elizabeth's cruel plot. A full moon was shining into her chamber, illuminating everything around her in silvery light. That was when she noticed for the first time that there were bars on her window.

Don´t you ever get tired of believing, Madame? Don´t you ever want proof? Madame Manec rests a hand on Marie-Laure's forehead. The thick hand that first reminded her of a gardener's or a geologist's. You must never stop believing. That's the most important thing.

The Summer Day Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean— the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down— who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Blue light streamed out from her hands and pounded into the desert. An enormous mass of sand flew into the air, leaving behind a gaping hole. The officers closest to it fell back on the ground from the energy pushing up into the air as if the earth was exhaling a breath held for hundreds of years.

After a while Mary said, “Zsadist?” “Yeah?” “What are those markings?” His frowned and flicked his eyes over to her, thinking, as if she didn’t know? But then . . . well, she had been a human. Maybe she didn’t. “They’re slave bands. I was . . . a slave.” “Did it hurt when they were put on you?” “Yes.” “Did the same person who cut your face give them to you?” “No, my owner’s hellren did that. My owner . . . she put the bands on me. He was the one who cut my face.” “How long were you a slave?” “A hundred years.” “How did you get free?” “Phury. Phury got me out. That’s how he lost his leg.” “Were you hurt while you were a slave?” Z swallowed hard. “Yes.” “Do you still think about it?” “Yes.” He looked down at his hands, which suddenly were in pain for some reason. Oh, right. He’d made two fists and was squeezing them so tightly his fingers were about to snap off at the knuckles. “Does slavery still happen?” “No. Wrath outlawed it. As a mating gift to me and Bella.” “What kind of slave were you?” Zsadist shut his eyes. Ah, yes, the question he didn’t want to answer. For a while it was all he could do to force himself to stay in the chair. But then, in a falsely level voice, he said, “I was a blood slave. I was used by a female for blood.” The quiet after he spoke bore down on him, a tangible weight. “Zsadist? Can I put my hand on your back?” His head did something that was evidently a nod, because Mary’s gentle palm came down lightly on his shoulder blade. She moved it in a slow, easy circle. “Those are the right answers,” she said. “All of them.” He had to blink fast as the fire in the furnace’s window became blurry. “You think?” he said hoarsely. “No. I know.

Mary tucked into a ball, shielding herself from the tail's barbs. She covered her ears and closed her eyes, cutting off the juicy sounds and the horrible sight of the killing. Moments later she felt her body being nudged. The beast was pushing at her with its nose. She rolled over and looked up into its white eyes. "I'm fine. But we're going to have to work on your table manners." The beast purred and stretched out on the ground next to her, resting its head between its forelegs. There was a brilliant flash of light and then Rhage appeared in the same position.

However, the majority of women are neither harlots nor courtesans; nor do they sit clasping pug dogs to dusty velvet all through the summer afternoon. But what do they do then? and there came to my mind’s eye one of those long streets somewhere south of the river whose infinite rows are innumerably populated. With the eye of the imagination I saw a very ancient lady crossing the street on the arm of a middle-aged woman, her daughter, perhaps, both so respectably booted and furred that their dressing in the afternoon must be a ritual, and the clothes themselves put away in cupboards with camphor, year after year, throughout the summer months. They cross the road when the lamps are being lit (for the dusk is their favourite hour), as they must have done year after year. The elder is close on eighty; but if one asked her what her life has meant to her, she would say that she remembered the streets lit for the battle of Balaclava, or had heard the guns fire in Hyde Park for the birth of King Edward the Seventh. And if one asked her, longing to pin down the moment with date and season, but what were you doing on the fifth of April 1868, or the second of November 1875, she would look vague and say that she could remember nothing. For all the dinners are cooked; the plates and cups washed; the children sent to school and gone out into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it. And the novels, without meaning to, inevitably lie. All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded, I said, addressing Mary Carmichael as if she were present; and went on in thought through the streets of London feeling in imagination the pressure of dumbness, the accumulation of unrecorded life, whether from the women at the street corners with their arms akimbo, and the rings embedded in their fat swollen fingers, talking with a gesticulation like the swing of Shakespeare’s words; or from the violet-sellers and match-sellers and old crones stationed under doorways; or from drifting girls whose faces, like waves in sun and cloud, signal the coming of men and women and the flickering lights of shop windows. All that you will have to explore, I said to Mary Carmichael, holding your torch firm in your hand.

Even If I Don’t See it Again Even if I don’t see it again.–nor ever feel it I know it is–and that if once it hailed me it ever does– and so it is myself I want to turn in that direction not as towards a place, but it was a tilting within myself, as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where it isn’t.–I was blinded like that–and swam in what shone at me only able to endure it by being no one and so specifically myself I thought I’d die from being loved like that.

You like telling your stories,” said my friend in that coffee shop, “because you’re secure enough in your current self, the self that’s firmly established in a godly life, that you can laugh at your mistakes, even the dark moments, while pointing to the light you stand in right now and say, ‘See? if I made it, so can you.

She kisses him, lips parted, slow and sexy, lightly touching his lips with her tongue, offering wonders that would rock his world, while delivering nothing. Open mouthed, seductive, warm, inviting and … dangerous. Even I can feel the explosive sexual energy held in check behind her bare feather of a touch. She’s making sure he feels it, slapping him in the face with all she could offer—but isn’t.

All day the storm lasted. The windows were white and the wind never stopped howling and screaming. It was pleasant in the warm house. Laura and Mary did their lessons, then Pa played the fiddle while Ma rocked and knitted, and bean soup simmered on the stove. All night the storm lasted, and all the next day. Fire-light danced out of the stove's draught, and Pa told stories and played the fiddle.

Sometimes, when you're deep in the countryside, you meet three girls, walking along the hill tracks in the dusk, spinning. They each have a spindle, and on to these they are spinning their wool, milk-white, like the moonlight. In fact, it is the moonlight, the moon itself, which is why they don't carry a distaff. They're not Fates, or anything terrible; they don't affect the lives of men; all they have to do is to see that the world gets its hours of darkness, and they do this by spinning the moon down out of the sky. Night after night, you can see the moon getting less and less, the ball of light waning, while it grown on the spindles of the maidens. Then, at length, the moon is gone, and the world has darkness, and rest..... ...on the darkest night, the maidens take their spindles down to the sea, to wash their wool. And the wool slips from the spindles into the water, and unravels in long ripples of light from the shore to the horizon, and there is the moon again, rising above the sea....Only when all the wool is washed, and wound again into a white ball in the sky, can the moon-spinners start their work once more....

He said focus. The word focus. I hear angels singing. Everything goes dark except for a light that beams down on Sean. It is a God-given sign- like when people see the Virgin Mary in their grilled cheese, except this isn't religious and I'm actually not a big fan of dairy. I stare at the back of his head. His HEAD. Something I see every day but never really see because it's been there forever. Since the first day of third grade. I crumple up my web. I don't need it. Praise be, the Focus Gods have spoken. I am going to write about Sean Griswold's Head.

The Lesson You've Got to learn is the someday you'll someday stagger to, blinking in cold light, all tears shed, ready to poke your bovine head in the yoke they've shaped. Everyone learns this. Born, everyone breathes, pays tax, plants dead and hurts galore. There's grief enough for each. My mother learned by moving man to man, outlived them all. The parched earth's bare (once she leaves it) of any who watched the instants I trod it. Other than myself, of course. I've made a study of bearing and forbearance. Everyone does, it turns out, and note those faces passing by: Not one's a god.

Understand from the first this certainty. Butterflies don’t write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn’t mean they don’t know, in their own way, what they are. That they don’t know they are alive—that they don’t feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily. Humility is the prize of the leaf-world. Vainglory is the bane of us, the humans.

The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work — who is thus responsible to the work… Serious interruptions to work, therefore, are never the inopportune, cheerful, even loving interruptions which come to us from another. […] It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all. There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

There were intervals in which she could sit perfectly still, enjoying the outer stillness and the subdued light. The red fire with its gently audible movement seemed like a solemn existence calmly independent of the petty passions, the imbecile desires, the straining after worthless uncertainties, which were daily moving her contempt. Mary was fond of her own thoughts, and could amuse herself well sitting in the twilight with her hands in her lap; for, having early had strong reason to believe that things were not likely to be arranged for her peculiar satisfaction, she wasted no time in astonishment and annoyance at that fact. And she had already come to take life very much as a comedy in which she had a proud, nay, a generous resolution not to act the mean or treacherous part. Mary might have become cynical if she had not had parents whom she honoured, and a well of affectionate gratitude within her, which was all the fuller because she had learned to make no unreasonable claims. She sat to-night revolving, as she was wont, the scenes of the day, her lips often curling with amusement at the oddities to which her fancy added fresh drollery: people were so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fools' caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else's were transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone were rosy.

Those last nights in Paris, walking home with her father at midnight, the huge book clasped against her chest, Marie-Laure thinks she can sense a shiver beneath the air, in the pauses between the chirring of the insects, like the spider cracks of ice when too much weight is set upon it. As if all this time the city has been no more than a scale model built by her father and the shadow of a great hand has fallen over it.

Mary Lou wore the ring faithfully. She studied the coy girls the ones who pretended not to get the dirty joke that made Mary Lou stifle a laugh. The ones who practiced the shy downward glance who pretended giggly outrage when a boy made a suggestive remark who waited to be seen and never made the first move. The ones who called other girls sluts and judged with ease. The good girls. Occasionally from the school bus windows she would see other wild girls on the edges of cornfields running without shoes hair unkempt. Their short skirts rode up flashing warning lights of flesh: backs of knees the curve of a calf a smooth plain of thigh. Sometimes it was just a girl waiting for a bus but in her eyes Mary Lou recognized the feral quality. That was a girl who wanted to race trains under a full moon a girl who liked the feel of silk stockings against her skin the whisper promise of a boy's neck under her lips who did not wait for life to choose her but wished to do the choosing herself. It made Mary Lou ache with everything she held back.

The complete stillness of my energy is something I have never felt before. I am full of light. I am confused. A strange mix of guilt and wonder swims inside me. The thought of ruling Kenettra with Enzo at my side - Enzo, who had saved me from certain death, who brought my powers out with a mere touch of his hand on my back, whose own fire awakened my ambitions - thrills me. So why am I here, this close to a boy who is not my prince? Why am I reacting in this way to his touch?

I just can't see the upside in this," I heard myself say by way of explanation. Later he said that if John had been sitting in the office he would have found this funny, as he himself had found it. "Of course I knew what you meant to say, and John would have known too, you meant to say you couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel." I agreed, but this was not in fact the case. I had meant pretty much exactly what I said: I couldn't see the upside in this. As I thought about the difference between the two sentences I realized that my impression of myself had been of someone who could look for, and find, the upside in any situation. I had believed in the logic of popular songs. I had looked for the silver lining. I had walked on through the storm. It occurs to me now that these were not even the songs of my generation. They were the songs, and the logic, of the generation or two that preceded my own. The score for my generation was Les Paul and Mary Ford, "How High the Moon," a different logic altogether. It also occurs to me, not an original thought but novel to me, that the logic of those earlier songs was based on self-pity. The singer of the song about looking for the silver lining believes that clouds have come her way. The singer of the song about walking on through the storm assumes that the storm could otherwise take her down.

Everything about her in that moment was soft, and that was one of his favorite memories later on--her tense grace made tender by the dimness, her eyes and hands and especially her lips, infinitely soft. He kissed her again and again, and each kiss was nearer to the last one of all. Heavy and soft with love, they walked back to the gate. Mary and Serafina were waiting. "Lyra--" Will said. And she said, "Will." He cut a window into Cittàgazze. They were deep in the parkland around the great house, not far from the edge of the forest. He stepped through for the last time and looked down over the silent city, the tiled roofs gleaming in the moonlight, the tower above them, the lighted ship waiting out on the still sea. He turned to Serafina and said as steadily as he could, "Thank you, Serafina Pekkala, for rescuing us at the belvedere, and for everything else. Please be kind to Lyra for as long as she lives. I love her more than anyone has ever been loved.

Oh, I know Papa is a wonderful borrower. I know we’ve managed to stay when all the others have gone. But what has it done for us, in the end? I don’t think it’s so clever to live on alone, for ever and ever, in a great, big, half-empty house; under the floor, with no one to talk to, no one to play with, nothing to see but dust and passages, no light but candlelight and firelight and what comes through the cracks.

I saw the first light, fore-running the sun, gather in a cup of the eastern cloud, gather and grow and brim, till at last it spilled like milk over the golden lip, to smear the dark face of heaven from end to end. From east to north, and back to south again, the clouds slackened, the stars, trembling on the verge of extinction, guttered in the dawn wind, and the gates of day were ready to open at the trumpet. . .

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready to break my heart as the sun rises, as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers and they open — pools of lace, white and pink — and all day the black ants climb over them, boring their deep and mysterious holes into the curls, craving the sweet sap, taking it away to their dark, underground cities — and all day under the shifty wind, as in a dance to the great wedding, the flowers bend their bright bodies, and tip their fragrance to the air, and rise, their red stems holding all that dampness and recklessness gladly and lightly, and there it is again — beauty the brave, the exemplary, blazing open. Do you love this world? Do you cherish your humble and silky life? Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath? Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden, and softly, and exclaiming of their dearness, fill your arms with the white and pink flowers, with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling, their eagerness to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are nothing, forever?

Madams Manec's energy, Marie-Lauren is learning, is extraordinary; she burgeons, shoots off stalks, wakes early, works late, concocts basques without a drop of cream, loaves with less than a cup of flour. They clomp together through the narrow streets, Marie-Laure's hand on the back of Madame's apron, following the odors of her stews and cakes; in such moments Madame seems like a great moving wall of rose bushes, thorny and fragrant and crackling with bees.

A new moon lay on its back, and stars were out. Here, away from lights and sounds of town or village, the night was deep, the black sky stretching, fathomless, away among the spheres to some unimaginable world where gods walked, and suns and moons showered down like petals falling. Some power there is that draws men's eyes and hearts up and outward, beyond the heavy clay that fastens them to earth. Music can take them, and the moon's light, and, I suppose, love, though I had not known it then, except in worship.

You must never stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life. I don’t mean it’s easy or assured; there are the stubborn stumps of shame, grief that remains unsolvable after all the years, a bag of stones that goes with one wherever one goes and however the hour may call for dancing and for light feet. But there is, also, the summoning world, the admirable energies of the world, better than anger, better than bitterness and, because more interesting, more alleviating. And there is the thing that one does, the needle one plies, the work, and within that work a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them solely and with meticulous effort into some shapely heat-retaining form, even as the gods, or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe – that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.

When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too. She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another. Her father had held a position under the English Government and had always been busy and ill himself, and her mother had been a great beauty who cared only to go to parties and amuse herself with gay people.

It came down to that flexibility of a person’s mind. An ability to withstand horrors and snap back, like a fresh elastic band. A flinty mind shattered. In this way, he was glad not to be an adult. A grown-up’s mind—even one belonging to a decent man like Scoutmaster Tim—lacked that elasticity. The world had been robbed of all its mysteries, and with those mysteries went the horror. Adults didn’t believe in old wives’ tales. You didn’t see adults stepping over sidewalk cracks out of the fear that they might somehow, some way, break their mothers’ backs. They didn’t wish on stars: not with the squinty-eyed fierceness of kids, anyway. You’ll never find an adult who believes that saying “Bloody Mary” three times in front of a mirror in a dark room will summon a dark, blood-hungry entity. Adults were scared of different things: their jobs, their mortgages, whether they hung out with the “right people,” whether they would die unloved. These were pallid compared to the fears of a child—leering clowns under the bed and slimy monsters capering beyond the basement’s light and faceless sucking horrors from beyond the stars. There’s no 12-step or self-help group for dealing with those fears. Or maybe there is: you just grow up. And when you do, you surrender the nimbleness of mind required to believe in such things—but also to cope with them. And so when adults find themselves in a situation where that nimbleness is needed . . . well, they can’t summon it. So they fall to pieces: go insane, panic, suffer heart attacks and aneurysms brought on by fright. Why? They simply don’t believe it could be happening. That’s what’s different about kids: they believe everything can happen, and fully expect it to.

There are the stubborn stumps of shame, grief that remains unsolvable after all the years, a bag of stones that goes with one wherever one goes and however the hour may call for dancing and for light feet. energies of the world, better than anger, better than bitterness and, because more interesting, more alleviating. And there is the thing that one does, the needle one plies, the work, and within that work a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and with meticulous effort into some shapely heat-retaining form, even as the gods, or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe—that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.

Sisters forever,” Violetta declared, in her tiny, young voice. Until death, even in death, even beyond. “I love you,” Violetta says, hanging fiercely on to me even as my strength dies. I love you too. I lean against her, exhausted. “Violetta,” I murmur. I feel strange, delirious, as if a fever had wrapped me in a dream. Words emerge, faint and ethereal, from someone who reminds me of myself, but I can no longer be sure I am still here. Am I good? I am trying to ask her. Tears fall from Violetta’s eyes. She says nothing. Perhaps she can no longer hear me. I am small in this moment, turning smaller. My lips can barely move. After a lifetime of darkness, I want to leave something behind that is made of light. Both of her hands cup my face. Violetta stares at me with a look of determination, and then she brings me to her and hugs me close. “You are a light,” she replies gently. “And when you shine, you shine bright.

You can die for it - an idea, or the world. People have done so, brilliantly, letting their small bodies be bound to the stake, creating an unforgettable fury of light. But this morning, climbing the familiar hills in the familiar fabric of dawn, I thought of China and India and Europe, and I thought how the sun blazes for everyone just so joyfully as it rises under the lashes of my own eyes, and I thought I am so many! What is my name? What is the name of the deep breath I would take over and over for all of us? Call it whatever you want, it is happiness, it is another one of the ways to enter fire.

Jase had seen me, restless, walking, organizing supplies that were already ordered. Everyone else was asleep on their bedrolls. He came up behind me, his hands circling my waist. "I can't sleep either," he said. His lips grazed my neck, and he whispered, "Tell me a riddle, Kazi." We laid out a blanket on a bed of grass, the stars of Hetisha's Chariot, Eagle's Nest, and Thieves' Gold lighting our way, far from everyone else. I settled in next to him, laying my head in the crook of his shoulder, his arm wrapping around me, pulling me close. "Listen carefully now, Jase Ballenger. I won't repeat myself." "I'm a good listener." I know you are. I've known that since our first night together. That's what makes you dangerous. You make me want to share everything with you. I cleared my throat, signaling I was ready to begin. "If I were a color, I'd be red as a rose, I make your blood rush, and tingle your toes, I taste of honey and spring, and a good bit of trouble, But I make the birds sing, and all the stars double. I can be quick, a mere peck, or slow and divine, And that is probably, the very best kind." "Hmm..." he said, as if stumped. "Let me think for a minute..." He rolled up on one elbow, looking down at me, the stars dusting his cheekbones. "Honey?" He kissed my forehead. "Spring?" He kissed my chin. "You are a good bit of trouble, Kazi of Brightmist." "I try my best." "I may have to take this one slowly..." His hand traveled leisurely from my waist, across my ribs, to my neck, until he was cupping my cheek. My blood rushed; the stars blurred. "Very slowly...to figure it all out." And then his lips pressed, warm and demanding onto mine, and I hoped it would take him an eternity to solve the riddle.

The moon occurs more frequently than the sun as an image in lyric poetry. There is a greater contrast between the moon and the night sky than there is between the sun and the daytime sky. And this contrast is more conducive to sorrow, which always separates or isolates itself, than it is to happiness, which always joins or blends. And to stand face-to-face with the sun is preposterous -- it would blind you. The moon has no light of its own; our apprehension of it is but a reflection of the sun. And some believe artists reflect the creative powers of some original impulse too great to name. The moon is the incunabulum of photography, the first photograph, the first stilled moment, the first study in contrasts. Me here -- you there. Between 1969 and 1972, six missions left for the moon and six missions came back. The men who went to the moon who were forever altered without exception all say the same thing -- it was not being on the moon that profoundly affected them as much as it was looking at the earth from the vantage point of the moon. You there -- me here.

THE MOON AND THE YEW TREE This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue. The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God, Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility. Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place Separated from my house by a row of headstones. I simply cannot see where there is to get to. The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right, White as a knuckle and terribly upset. It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here. Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection. At the end, they soberly bong out their names. The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape. The eyes lift after it and find the moon. The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls. How I would like to believe in tenderness The face of the effigy, gentled by candles, Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes. I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering Blue and mystical over the face of the stars. Inside the church, the saints will be all blue, Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews, Their hands and faces stiff with holiness. The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild. And the message of the yew tree is blackness -- blackness and silence. --written 22 October 1961

It looked like she held a basketful of woven gold. Arin leap down the stairs. He strode up to his cousin and seized her arm. “Arin!” “What did you do?” Sarsine jerked away. “What she wanted. Pull yourself together.” But Arin only saw Kestrel as she had been last night before the ball. How her hair had been a spill of low light over his palms. He had threaded desire into those braids, had wanted her to sense it even as he dreaded that she would. He had met her eyes in the mirror, and didn’t know, couldn’t tell her feelings. He only knew the fire of his own. “It’s just hair,” Sarsine said. “It will grow back.” “Yes,” said Arin, “but not everything does.

What happens to the leaves after they turn red and golden and fall away? What happens to the singing birds when they can’t sing any longer? What happens to their quick wings? Do you think there is any personal heaven for any of us? Do you think anyone, the other side of that darkness, will call to us, meaning us? Beyond the trees the foxes keep teaching their children to live in the valley. so they never seem to vanish, they are always there in the blossom of light that stands up every morning in the dark sky. And over one more set of hills, along the sea, the last roses have opened their factories of sweetness and are giving it back to the world. If I had another life I would want to spend it all on some unstinting happiness. I would be a fox, or a tree full of waving branches. I wouldn’t mind being a rose in a field full of roses. Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition. Reason they have not yet thought of. Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what. Or any other foolish question.

Last night I thought I kissed the loneliness from out your belly button. I thought I did, but later you sat up, all bones and restless hands, and told me there is a knot in your body that I cannot undo. I never know what to say to these things. “It’s okay.” “Come back to bed.” “Please don’t go away again.” Sometimes you are gone for days at a time and it is all I can do not to call the police, file a missing person’s report, even though you are right there, still sleeping next to me in bed. But your eyes are like an empty house in winter: lights left on to scare away intruders. Except in this case I am the intruder and you are already locked up so tight that no one could possibly jimmy their way in. Last night I thought I gave you a reason not to be so sad when I held your body like a high note and we both trembled from the effort. Some people, though, are sad against all reason, all sensibility, all love. I know better now. I know what to say to the things you admit to me in the dark, all bones and restless hands. “It’s okay.” “You can stay in bed.” “Please come back to me again.

As the native drum kept rhythm with the nighttime symphony of the African bush, the cry of a hyrax (a small, furry animal that sounded a lot scarier than it looked) pierced the night. A hyena howled. A warthog ran through our camp. What was he running from? Sitting in front of my tent, I tried to figure everything out. I wouldn’t have called what I did prayer but maybe wonder.    Night after night, I’d listened to the rush of a river or watched my own personal light show as lightning spider-webbed across the heavens, danced in the distance, and serenaded me with a muffled growl. Until a crash—so loud it seemed to break the sky—caused me to twitch as a shiver ran up my spine.    “You know how it is when you feel someone staring at you from across the room?” I said to Truth. “You turn to meet the gaze. It was like that, but I saw no one. I just felt a comforting presence as we sat together in silence.”    “You think it was God?” she asked.    “Yeah, but I called him Fred. Not so overwhelming, more personal.” 

Is the mask magic?" he demanded with sudden, passionate interest. "Yes." I bowed my head, so that our eyes no longer met. "I made it magic to keep you safe. The mask is your friend, Erik. As long as you wear it, no mirror can ever show you the face again." He was silent then and when I showed him the new mask he accepted it without question and put it on hastily with his clumsy, bandaged fingers. But when I stood up to go, he reacted with panic and clutched at my grown. "Don't go! Don't leave me here in the dark." "You are not in the dark," I said patiently. "Look, I have left the candle ..." But I knew, as I looked at him, that it would have made no difference if I had left him fifty candles. The darkness he feared was in his own mind and there was no light in the universe powerful enough to take that darkness from him. With a sigh of resignation I sat back on the bed and began to sing softly; and before I had finished the first verse, he was asleep. The bandages on his hands and wrists showed white and eerie in the candle-light, as I eased my skirts from his grasp. I knew that Marie was right. Physically and mentally, I had scarred him for life.

The tale is told by royalty and vagabonds alike, nobles and peasants, hunters and farmers, the old and the young. The tale comes from ever corner of the world, but no matter where it is told, it is always the same story, A boy on horseback, wandering at night, in the woods or on the plains or along the shores. The sound of a lute drifts in the evening air. Over head are the stars of a clear sky, a sheet of light so bright that he reaches up, trying to touch them. He stops and descends from his horse. Then he waits. He waits until exactly midnight, when the newest constellation in the sky blinks into existence. If you are very quiet and do not look away, you may see the brightest star in the constellation glow steadily brighter. It brightens until it overwhelms every other star in the sky, brightens until it seems to touch the ground, and then the glow is gone, and it its place is a girl. Her hair and lashes are painted a shifting silver, and a scar crosses one side of her face. She is dressed in Sealand silks and a necklace of sapphire. Some say that, once upon a time, she had a prince, a father, a society of friends. Other say that she was once a wicked queen, a worker of illusions, a girl who brought darkness across the lands. Still others say that she once had a sister, and that she loved her dearly. Perhaps all of these are true. She walks to the boy, tilts her head up at him, and smiles. He bends down to kiss her. Then he helps her onto the horse, and she rides away with him to a faraway place, until they can no longer be seen. These are only rumors, of course, and make little more than a story to tell around the fire. But it is told. And thus they live on. --"The Midnight Star", a folktale

And it is in New York I have those strangest things of all: human friendships. Not many friendships and not of spent familiarities: for I don't like actual human beings too much around me. But yet friendships made of the edges of thoughts and vivid pathos and pregnant odds and ends of nervous human flesh and fire. It is in New York I go to the apartment of a Friend at the end of an afternoon. In the apartment are some persons having tea, men and women. The Friend greets me at the door. She wears maybe a dress of thin dark and light silk, shaped in the quaint outlandish fashion of the hour. And she has shrewd kindly eyes like a Rembrandt portrait, and a worn New-York-ish Latin-ish brain and heart both of which are made of steel, sparkle and the very plain red meat of living. She says, 'Hello-Mary-Mac-Lane,' and clasps my hand, and we exchange a glance of no real understanding at all but suggesting warmed challenge of personality, and an oblique sweet call of depth to depth, and of friendship which by mere force of preference and of our separate quality and calibre is true rather than false. So close and no closer may friendship be. And friendship with-all, is closer than any love. It is the closest human beings ever come to meeting.

I am already far north of London, and as I walk in the streets of Petersburgh, I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves and fills me with delight. Do you understand this feeling? This breeze, which has travelled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes. Inspirited by this wind of promise, my daydreams become more fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. There, Margaret, the sun is forever visible, its broad disk just skirting the horizon and diffusing a perpetual splendour. There—for with your leave, my sister, I will put some trust in preceding navigators—there snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe. Its productions and features may be without example, as the phenomena of the heavenly bodies undoubtedly are in those undiscovered solitudes. What may not be expected in a country of eternal light? I may there discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle and may regulate a thousand celestial observations that require only this voyage to render their seeming eccentricities consistent forever. I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited, and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man. These are my enticements, and they are sufficient to conquer all fear of danger or death and to induce me to commence this laborious voyage with the joy a child feels when he embarks in a little boat, with his holiday mates, on an expedition of discovery up his native river. But supposing all these conjectures to be false, you cannot contest the inestimable benefit which I shall confer on all mankind, to the last generation, by discovering a passage near the pole to those countries, to reach which at present so many months are requisite; or by ascertaining the secret of the magnet, which, if at all possible, can only be effected by an undertaking such as mine.

Eventually they climb sixteen steps into the Gallery of Mineralogy. The guide shows them a gate from Brazil and violet amethysts and a meteorite on a pedestal that he claims is as ancient as the solar system itself. Then he leads them single file down two twisting staircases and along several corridors and stops outside an iron door with a single keyhole. “End of tour,” he says. A girl says, “But what’s through there?” “Behind this door is another locked door, slightly smaller.” “And what’s behind that?” “A third locked door, smaller yet.” “What’s behind that?” “A fourth door, and a fifth, on and on until you reach a thirteenth, a little locked door no bigger than a shoe.” The children lean forward. “And then?” “Behind the thirteenth door”—the guide flourishes one of his impossibly wrinkled hands—“is the Sea of Flames.” Puzzlement. Fidgeting. “Come now. You’ve never heard of the Sea of Flames?” The children shake their heads. Marie-Laure squints up at the naked bulbs strung in three-yard intervals along the ceiling; each sets a rainbow-colored halo rotating in her vision. The guide hangs his cane on his wrist and rubs his hands together. “It’s a long story. Do you want to hear a long story?” They nod. He clears his throat. “Centuries ago, in the place we now call Borneo, a prince plucked a blue stone from a dry riverbed because he thought it was pretty. But on the way back to his palace, the prince was attacked by men on horseback and stabbed in the heart.” “Stabbed in the heart?” “Is this true?” A boy says, “Hush.” “The thieves stole his rings, his horse, everything. But because the little blue stone was clenched in his fist, they did not discover it. And the dying prince managed to crawl home. Then he fell unconscious for ten days. On the tenth day, to the amazement of his nurses, he sat up, opened his hand, and there was the stone. “The sultan’s doctors said it was a miracle, that the prince never should have survived such a violent wound. The nurses said the stone must have healing powers. The sultan’s jewelers said something else: they said the stone was the largest raw diamond anyone had ever seen. Their most gifted stonecutter spent eighty days faceting it, and when he was done, it was a brilliant blue, the blue of tropical seas, but it had a touch of red at its center, like flames inside a drop of water. The sultan had the diamond fitted into a crown for the prince, and it was said that when the young prince sat on his throne and the sun hit him just so, he became so dazzling that visitors could not distinguish his figure from light itself.” “Are you sure this is true?” asks a girl. “Hush,” says the boy. “The stone came to be known as the Sea of Flames. Some believed the prince was a deity, that as long as he kept the stone, he could not be killed. But something strange began to happen: the longer the prince wore his crown, the worse his luck became. In a month, he lost a brother to drowning and a second brother to snakebite. Within six months, his father died of disease. To make matters even worse, the sultan’s scouts announced that a great army was gathering in the east. "The prince called together his father’s advisers. All said he should prepare for war, all but one, a priest, who said he’d had a dream. In the dream the Goddess of the Earth told him she’d made the Sea of Flames as a gift for her lover, the God of the Sea, and was sending the jewel to him through the river. But when the river dried up, and the prince plucked it out, the goddess became enraged. She cursed the stone and whoever kept it.

There is a bench in the back of my garden shaded by Virginia creeper, climbing roses, and a white pine where I sit early in the morning and watch the action. Light blue bells of a dwarf campanula drift over the rock garden just before my eyes. Behind it, a three-foot stand of aconite is flowering now, each dark blue cowl-like corolla bowed for worship or intrigue: thus its common name, monkshood. Next to the aconite, black madonna lilies with their seductive Easter scent are just coming into bloom. At the back of the garden, a hollow log, used in its glory days for a base to split kindling, now spills white cascade petunias and lobelia. I can't get enough of watching the bees and trying to imagine how they experience the abundance of, say, a blue campanula blosssom, the dizzy light pulsing, every fiber of being immersed in the flower. ... Last night, after a day in the garden, I asked Robin to explain (again) photosynthesis to me. I can't take in this business of _eating light_ and turning it into stem and thorn and flower... I would not call this meditation, sitting in the back garden. Maybe I would call it eating light. Mystical traditions recognize two kinds of practice: _apophatic mysticism_, which is the dark surrender of Zen, the Via Negativa of John of the Cross, and _kataphatic mysticism_, less well defined: an openhearted surrender to the beauty of creation. Maybe Francis of Assissi was, on the whole, a kataphatic mystic, as was Thérèse of Lisieux in her exuberant momemnts: but the fact is, kataphatic mysticism has low status in religious circles. Francis and Thérèse were made, really made, any mother superior will let you know, in the dark nights of their lives: no more of this throwing off your clothes and singing songs and babbling about the shelter of God's arms. When I was twelve and had my first menstrual period, my grandmother took me aside and said, 'Now your childhood is over. You will never really be happy again.' That is pretty much how some spiritual directors treat the transition from kataphatic to apophatic mysticism. But, I'm sorry, I'm going to sit here every day the sun shines and eat this light. Hung in the bell of desire.

New Rule: Death isn’t always sad. This week, the Reverend Jerry Falwell died, and millions of Americans asked, “Why? Why, God? Why…didn’t you take Pat Robertson with him?” I don’t want to say Jerry was disliked by the gay community, but tonight in New York City, at exactly eight o’clock, Broadway theaters along the Great White Way turned their lights up for two minutes. I know you’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but I think we can make an exception, because speaking ill of the dead was kind of Jerry Falwell’s hobby. He’s the guy who said AIDS was God’s punishment for homosexuality and that 9/11 was brought on by pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, and the ACLU—or, as I like to call them, my studio audience. It was surreal watching people on the news praise Falwell, followed by a clip package of what he actually said—things like: "Homosexuals are part of a vile and satanic system that will be utterly annihilated." "If you’re not a born-again Christian, you’re a failure as a human being." "Feminists just need a man in the house." "There is no separation of church and state." And, of course, everyone’s favorite: "The purple Teletubby is gay." Jerry Falwell found out you could launder your hate through the cover of “God’s will”—he didn’t hate gays, God does. All Falwell’s power came from name-dropping God, and gay people should steal that trick. Don’t say you want something because it’s your right as a human being—say you want it because it’s your religion. Gay men have been going at things backward. Forget civil right, and just make gayness a religion. I mean, you’re kneeling anyway. And it’s easy to start a religion. Watch, I’ll do it for you. I had a vision last night. The Blessed Virgin Mary came to me—I don’t know how she got past the guards—and she told me it’s time to take the high ground from the Seventh-day Adventists and give it to the twenty-four-hour party people. And that what happens in the confessional stays in the confessional. Gay men, don’t say you’re life partners. Say you’re a nunnery of two. “We weren’t having sex,officer. I was performing a very private mass.Here in my car. I was letting my rod and my staff comfort him.” One can only hope that as Jerry Falwell now approaches the pearly gates, he is met there by God Himself, wearing a Fire Island muscle shirt and nut-hugger shorts, saying to Jerry in a mighty lisp, “I’m not talking to you.

DEAR MAMA, I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to write. Every time I try to write to you and Papa I realize I’m not saying the things that are in my heart. That would be O.K., if I loved you any less than I do, but you are still my parents and I am still your child. I have friends who think I’m foolish to write this letter. I hope they’re wrong. I hope their doubts are based on parents who loved and trusted them less than mine do. I hope especially that you’ll see this as an act of love on my part, a sign of my continuing need to share my life with you. I wouldn’t have written, I guess, if you hadn’t told me about your involvement in the Save Our Children campaign. That, more than anything, made it clear that my responsibility was to tell you the truth, that your own child is homosexual, and that I never needed saving from anything except the cruel and ignorant piety of people like Anita Bryant. I’m sorry, Mama. Not for what I am, but for how you must feel at this moment. I know what that feeling is, for I felt it for most of my life. Revulsion, shame, disbelief—rejection through fear of something I knew, even as a child, was as basic to my nature as the color of my eyes. No, Mama, I wasn’t “recruited.” No seasoned homosexual ever served as my mentor. But you know what? I wish someone had. I wish someone older than me and wiser than the people in Orlando had taken me aside and said, “You’re all right, kid. You can grow up to be a doctor or a teacher just like anyone else. You’re not crazy or sick or evil. You can succeed and be happy and find peace with friends—all kinds of friends—who don’t give a damn who you go to bed with. Most of all, though, you can love and be loved, without hating yourself for it.” But no one ever said that to me, Mama. I had to find it out on my own, with the help of the city that has become my home. I know this may be hard for you to believe, but San Francisco is full of men and women, both straight and gay, who don’t consider sexuality in measuring the worth of another human being. These aren’t radicals or weirdos, Mama. They are shop clerks and bankers and little old ladies and people who nod and smile to you when you meet them on the bus. Their attitude is neither patronizing nor pitying. And their message is so simple: Yes, you are a person. Yes, I like you. Yes, it’s all right for you to like me too. I know what you must be thinking now. You’re asking yourself: What did we do wrong? How did we let this happen? Which one of us made him that way? I can’t answer that, Mama. In the long run, I guess I really don’t care. All I know is this: If you and Papa are responsible for the way I am, then I thank you with all my heart, for it’s the light and the joy of my life. I know I can’t tell you what it is to be gay. But I can tell you what it’s not. It’s not hiding behind words, Mama. Like family and decency and Christianity. It’s not fearing your body, or the pleasures that God made for it. It’s not judging your neighbor, except when he’s crass or unkind. Being gay has taught me tolerance, compassion and humility. It has shown me the limitless possibilities of living. It has given me people whose passion and kindness and sensitivity have provided a constant source of strength. It has brought me into the family of man, Mama, and I like it here. I like it. There’s not much else I can say, except that I’m the same Michael you’ve always known. You just know me better now. I have never consciously done anything to hurt you. I never will. Please don’t feel you have to answer this right away. It’s enough for me to know that I no longer have to lie to the people who taught me to value the truth. Mary Ann sends her love. Everything is fine at 28 Barbary Lane. Your loving son, MICHAEL

With Tommy by his side but Anthony Jr. nowhere to be seen, Anthony cranks out an old 8mm projector, and soon choppy black- and-white images appear on the cream wall capturing a few snapshots from the canyon of their life—that tell nothing, and yet somehow everything. They watch old movies, from 1963, 1952, 1948, 1947—the older, the more raucous the children and parents becoming. This year, because Ingrid isn’t here, Anthony shows them something new. It’s from 1963. A birthday party, this one with happy sound, cake, unlit candles. Anthony is turning twenty. Tatiana is very pregnant with Janie. (“Mommy, look, that’s you in Grammy’s belly!” exclaims Vicky.) Harry toddling around, pursued loudly and relentlessly by Pasha—oh, how in 1999 six children love to see their fathers wild like them, how Mary and Amy love to see their precious husbands small. The delight in the den is abundant. Anthony sits on the patio, bare chested, in swimshorts, one leg draped over the other, playing his guitar, “playing Happy Birthday to myself,” he says now, except it’s not “Happy Birthday.” The joy dims slightly at the sight of their brother, their father so beautiful and whole he hurts their united hearts—and suddenly into the frame, in a mini-dress, walks a tall dark striking woman with endless legs and comes to stand close to Anthony. The camera remains on him because Anthony is singing, while she flicks on her lighter and ignites the candles on his cake; one by one she lights them as he strums his guitar and sings the number one hit of the day, falling into a burning “Ring of Fire ... ” The woman doesn’t look at Anthony, he doesn’t look at her, but in the frame you can see her bare thigh flush against the sole of his bare foot the whole time she lights his twenty candles plus one to grow on. And it burns, burns, burns . . . And when she is done, the camera—which never lies—catches just one microsecond of an exchanged glance before she walks away, just one gram of neutral matter exploding into an equivalent of 20,000 pounds of TNT. The reel ends. Next. The budding novelist Rebecca says, “Dad, who was that? Was that Grammy’s friend Vikki?” “Yes,” says Anthony. “That was Grammy’s friend Vikki.” Tak zhivya, bez radosti/bez muki/pomniu ya ushedshiye goda/i tvoi serebryannyiye ruki/v troike yeletevshey navsegda . . . So I live—remembering with sadness all the happy years now gone by, remembering your long and silver arms, forever in the troika that flew by . . . Back