Green Witch

by Alice Hoffman

Loss does different things to different people. Some fall apart. Some, like the Finder, rebuild. I have done both. I have crawled under my table and refused to come out. I have covered myself with thorns and tattoos. I have planted a garden, reached out to my neighbors, begun to write down my story.

Surely, I can never sit in judgement of the lost or the found.

When Things Fall Apart

by Pema Chodron

Instead of transcending the suffering of all creatures, we move toward the turbulence and doubt. We jump into it. We slide into it. We tiptoe into it. We move toward it however we can. We explore the reality and unpredictability of insecurity and pain, and we try not to push it away. If it takes years, if it takes lifetimes, we let it be as it is. At our own pace, without speed or aggression, we move down and down and down. With us move millions of others, our companions in awakening from fear. At the bottom we discover water, the healing water of bodhichitta. Right down there in the thick of things, we discover love that will not die.

The Hotel Under the Sand

by Kage Baker

Cleverness and bravery are absolutely necessary for good adventures.

Fahrenheit 451

by Ray Bradbury

They moved along the bank of the river, going south. Montag tried to see the men's faces, the old faces he remembered from the firelight, lined and tired. He was looking for a brightness, a resolve, a triumph over tomorrow that hardly seemed to be there. Perhaps he had expected their faces to burn and glitter with the knowledge they carried, to glow as lanterns glow, with the light in them. But all the light had come from the campfire, and these men had seemed no different than any others who had run a long race, searched a long search, seen good things destroyed, and now, very late, were gathered to wait for the end of the party and the blowing out of the lamps. They weren't at all certain that the things they carried in their heads might make every future dawn glow with a purer light, they were sure of nothing save that the books were on file behind their quiet eyes, the books were waiting, with their pages uncut, for the customers who might come by in later years, some with clean fingers and some with dirty fingers.

Montag squinted from one face to another as they walked.

"Don't judge a book by its cover," someone said.

And they all laughed quietly, moving downstream.

The Healing Power of Stories

by Daniel Taylor, Ph.D.

We live in stories the way fish live in water, breathing them in and out, bouyed up by them, taking from them our sustenance, but rarely concious of this element in which we exist. We are born into stories; they nurture and guide us through life; they help us know how to die. Stories make it possible for us to be human.

When the King Comes Home

by Caroline Stevermer

Life is short, as the wisdom of the ages has it, but fortunately art is long. I don't expect to understand much more of either than I already do. I was born with what wisdom I have, and the many years that I have lived served only to make the scantiness of that wisdom more evident. Though I do seem to do better than most people.

Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

No, I don't have to tell a soul about this, I promised myself. When you are a kid, you don't know yet that a secret, like an animal, can evolve. Like an animal, a secret can develop a self-preserving intelligence. Shaglike, mute and thick, a knowledge with a fur: your secret.

The Dance Boots

by Linda Legarde Grover

When she got home, she helped her mother and wrote letters. She read every day, silently in the morning and aloud before bed, from the only book in the house, the Bible. When the Indian agent's wife paid Mother for some ironing with a length of yellow calico, Henen cut and sewed a new blouse for Maggie on the new kitchen table--heavy and solid as a sow--that Baba had built right in the house. Sitting there one night, sewing with her delicate and even stitches, listening to Baba and Mother talk while they drank raspberry tea, listening to Nokom sucking on her pipe as she lit it with coal from the stove, Henen felt a tapping from within her belly, a lurch to the side. She hummed a song of gratitude.

The baby never moved again; instead, it shrank within Henen's belly, imperceptibly from day to day but nevertheless steadily from week to week. She began to reach for her belly when alone in the house, or in the outhouse, or when she forgot to keep her hands from idleness, searching in sickening composure for a small body, cupping her belly and using her fingers to prod a circle around the lump that every time she searched was harder, more dense, as the little body of her baby calcified and shrank to the shape and consistency of a robin's egg, until any appearance of a small saucepan shape that was a baby simply disappeared. And then, after that, every day, the spirit of her baby receded from her own and the others that continued to live, growing more and more distant, until when the children came back from school in June it had joined those other baby spirits who, because they were too small to walk, traveled to the other world on the east wind, which carried them gently in the sky, borne by visions of the Great Ojibwe Migration of long ago. Out of sight, they were mourned by bereft earth-bound mothers like Henen.

The Enchanted Castle

by E. Nesbit

And then it is as though a spring were touched, a fountain of light released. Everything changes. Or, rather, everything is revealed. There are no more secrets. The plan of the world seems plain, like an easy sum that one writes in big figures on a child's slate. One wonders how one can ever have wondered about anything. Space is not; every place that one has seen or dreamed of is here. Time is not; into this instant is crowded all that one has ever done or dreamed of doing. It is a moment and it is eternity. It is the centre of the universe and it is the universe itself. The eternal light rests on and illuminates the eternal heart of things.

Wild Geese

by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Natural Prozac

by Dr. Joel Robertson, with Tom Monte

As every adult knows, goodness and weakness exist in everyone; similarly, every situation--no matter how good or bad--contains difficulties and opportunities, Moreover, each of us helps to create--by our own efforts, behaviors, and attitudes--the outcome and the quality of every situation we find ourselves in.

The Widow and the King

by John Dickinson

[Ambrose] could see, through a square window behind the Widow's chair, the brown lines of hills he had travelled to come here. Out there were the comfortless places where barns stood ruined and fields all run to seed. That was where he had seen his mother fall, crumpling under the blow at the clifftop. That was where Wastelands was going, where enemies still roamed with steel in their hands. The walls between there and here were deep, hard stone. He could measure the casement of the window with his eye. The depth of it was longer than his arm's reach -- maybe twice as long. And now these people had taken his name, and put it beyond the walls with all the rest.

They had made him into someone else. He could still feel his sadness, but it had moved a little further from him.

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They were pulling her away, murmuring in her ear. [Sophia] let herself be pulled, because she had no strength to stay. She could not see. There was something wrong with her eyes. She put up her arm to wipe them, and found they were stinging with tears.

We've gone wrong, she thought. We made a mistake. Can't we go back to where we were? Can't we make a little change, so that he could be alive again?

And now the world crumbled, silently. Its floor gave way in a pouring of dust and left her hanging in its void -- empty colors, empty flowers, empty sky. Faces that came and went and spoke without meaning. Her eyes blinked, and opened again, and the colors were still there. A bee the color of soot rattled lightly among the thorn flowers a yard away. And none of it was worth anything any more, because Chawlin would never be again.

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And what was that, away to his right where the cleft opened into a broader valley? At first he thought it must be a boulder, strangely shaped, but otherwise the same as any in that land. Then he wondered if it was an old man, sitting in a cloak and hood with his back to them. But it did not have a hood.

He could see what he thought was long, dark hair falling to the figure's waist as it sat. He supposed it must be a woman. It seemed to be weeping.

"Don't look," came the word down the column of armed men. "Orcrim says, don't look."

Ambrose looked, and kept on looking as they straggled past.

It was impossible to guess how large she was, or how far away. At one moment he thought she must be no taller than his own mother, sitting at a distance of a hundred paces from them. The next he imagined himself walking and walking towards her, mile after mile and watching her grow as he approached until she was the size of a mountain. And whichever way he walked around her, she would always have her back to him.

And she would never see him. And she would never listen. And she would never, ever, cease from weeping.

"Don't look," said Hob.

Weeping, weeping. A lost child, and all the loss of all the world. Mar and Develin and Bay. Aunt Evalia, dead with her arms around him. And Adam diManey. And he must make peace with the killer.

"Don't stop," said Hob urgently, beside him.

He had made peace. Why?

Because he must. Because if he did not, he must make a corner in his heart that would be like that, like that. That endless rage and weeping.

He looked at the creature that was Beyah. He could hear her: that unending cry that shook the world. But it did not shake his heart. He had made his peace. He would hold to his purpose.

Funny Business: Conversations with Writers of Comedy

by Daniel Handler, edited by Leonard S. Marcus (via First Milk)

The primary advantage of a large vocabulary when you're young is entirely different from the primary advantage of a large vocabulary when you're an adult. When you're an adult it's so you can describe things with precision, and when you're a child it's mostly so that you can insult people without their knowing it or otherwise baffle them. A child with a large vocabulary is a trusted child. The idea is that a bookworm is not the kind of child who would ever get into any trouble. If, however, you are the kind of bookworm that I was, and you're reading Confessions of an Opium Eater, you are probably somewhat likelier to get into trouble than a child who knows fewer words.

A Song for Summer

by Eva Ibbotson

She followed Sophie into the castle. The rooms, with their high ceilings, gilded cornices and white tiled stoves, were as beautiful and neglected as the grounds. But when she reached the top floor and Sophie said: 'This is your room,' Ellen could only draw in her breath and say: 'Oh Sophie, how absolutely wonderful!'

The child looked round, her brow furrowed. The room contained a broken spinning wheel, a rolled up scroll painting of the Buddha (partly eaten by mice) and a pile of mouldering Left Book Club paperbacks -- all left behind by various housemothers who had not felt equal to the job.

But Ellen had gone straight to the window.

She was part of the sky, inhabiting it. One could ride these not very serious clouds, touch angels or birds, meet witches. White ones, of course, with functional broomsticks, who felt as she did about the world.

Lost in the light, the infinity of space that would be hers each day, she lowered her eyes only gradually to the famous view: the serrated snow peaks on the other shore, the climbing fir trees above the village, the blue oblong of water with its solitary island across which the steamer was chugging, returning to its base.

Sophie waited. Her own view was the same -- the room she shared with two other girls was only just down the corridor -- but when she looked out of the window something always got in the way: images of her warring parents, the terror of abandonment, the letters that did not come. Now for a moment she saw what Ellen saw.

When Ellen spoke again it was to ask a question. 'Are there storks here, Sophie? Do you have them at Hallendorf?'

'I don't think so.'

'We must get some,' said Ellen decidedly. 'We must make them come. Storks are lovely; they bless a house, did you know?'

Sophie considered this. 'It could be difficult about the blessing,' she said, 'because we don't have anybody to do it here. We don't have God.'

'Ah well,' said Ellen, turning back into the room. 'One thing at a time.'

Swan Lake

by Mark Helprin

I was sitting on one of our former tutorial benches, under an overhanging eave in the kitchen courtyard. It was raining heavily, as it must in spring to melt the snow so that summer can blaze across the steppes in green and blue. Watching the rain collide at an angle with a brick wall and then run down it in a tight embrace, I was trying to determine why at a certain volume and force the water bounced off, and why, if neither was sufficient, it didn't. I came to the conclusion that the gross mechanics were directly attributable to the molecular structure of the water, and that the thresholds of adhesion were determined by group particle affinity.

I believe I was slightly ahead of my time.