Longing

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Going Clear (2013)

  These stories were traded among his disciples as more evidence of his superhuman powers of discernment. ACCORDING TO SEVERAL Sea Org members, while he was in Las Palmas, Hubbard fell in love with another woman— Yvonne Gillham, the ship’s public relations officer. (She would later go on to start the Celebrity Centre in Hollywood.) She had a wide smile, large hazel eyes, and a short pixie haircut, bearing a resemblance to Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music . Gillham combined a down-to-earth personality with a touch of class that came from growing up in the high society of Queensland, Australia. Inevitably, Hubbard demanded that she accompany him on the high seas. Gillham had three young children at Saint Hill, and she had only joined the Sea Org on Hubbard’s pledge that they could stay with her, but Hubbard’s desire for her had become a prison, one that she was too loyal to escape. Hubbard was fifty-six years old in the fall of 1967, when he set sail with his youthful crew. There was no destination or purpose other than to wander. Hubbard was by now portly, ruddy-faced, and jowly; his swept-back, once-red hair had turned strawberry blond. His eyes, which have been described as blue or green by various observers, were actually gray, like seawater, casting an odd flatness over his aspect. Two strong lines transected his face: a deep furrow between his eyebrows, matching the notch below his nose and the cleft in his chin, and his duckbill lips, which were his most prominent feature. Once aboard, he dressed in various naval uniforms befitting his self-appointed station as Commodore of the fleet, with lots of braid and crossed anchors on his cap. There were three ships in Hubbard’s navy. In addition to the Avon River , there was a ketch called the Enchanter , and the 3,200-ton flagship, a flat-bottom cattle ferry originally called the Royal Scotsman , which was renamed the Royal Scotman because of a clerical error in the registration. The smokestack was emblazoned with the initials “LRH.” [image file=Image00015.jpg] Yvonne Gillham in a head shot she used during her modeling career, circa 1952 Hubbard spent most of his time in the air-conditioned captain’s cabin on the promenade deck of the Royal Scotman , surrounded by windows to take in the ocean vistas. He rarely drank on the ship, except perhaps to take the chill off on a cold night on the bridge. Drugs were nowhere in evidence. His days were largely solitary, passed in auditing himself and writing policy papers. His office on the top deck was called the Research Room. It was behind a pair of highly polished wooden doors with brass handles. The floor was a bright red linoleum covered with Oriental rugs; there was a massive mahogany desk and a huge mirror above a fireplace.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  That, she thought as she swayed back toward the bar along the edge of the dance floor, slurping a fresh oyster off its pearlescent shell, would be such a relief. Maybe then she’d stop seeing the scrapes and bruises on Feather’s chubby thighs, the cut across the bridge of their nose where someone must have hit them with a baton, or the butt of a gun. Maybe then she wouldn’t think about their mouth on her painfully stiff nipple, sucking gently, and their round baby face relaxed in exquisite peace. “’nother beer?” she slurred, dumping herself onto a stool and doing her best to focus her eyes on the woman tending bar, a wiry little fairy with spiky gray hair and laughing eyes. Just now she was pouring a draft for one of the city council women. Fawcett, the big black woman with the slumped, defeated shoulders. “With you in a sec.” A sudden squeal of laughter drew Ramona’s attention to the far end of the bar, where Jules and Sadie were rocking with mirth at something one of Molly’s women, a five-foot-nothing Legionnaire named Monica Sprat, was saying. “… things these fucking freaks say when you’re about to do them, I swear to God I’m not making it up. Swear to God.” She flashed a huge, shit-eating grin. “It looked right at Molly, like square in the eye, and it fuckin’ said, ‘I want my Daddy.’” Gales of mirth. Sounds of good-humored disgust and disbelief. Ramona looked away as though Sprat’s voice had burned her. The bartender was refilling her glass but just the thought of drinking it made her want to vomit. She staggered away from the bar, nearly knocking over Major Spiers and the dykey bunker negotiator, who were swaying slowly to “Tiny Dancer,” and through the dining room where women sat chatting around unset tables in the dim light of colored glass light fixtures. They looked like aliens in their little pools of blue and red and yellow. She slipped out the back door and into the night, the wind whipping at her open jacket and her hair. The cold salt air tasted clean. It brought tears to her eyes. Teach at Hunan Palace, biting into a hot dumpling so that pinkish meat juice trickled down her chin. She took me to the restaurant. Our restaurant. She was telling me she knew. A few dozen yards away, past the amorphous shadows of the picnic tables on the sand-strewn tiles, waves shushed over the beach. It was a cloudy night, the air damp and cool, a few stars glittering through in patches of bare sky. Almost November. She took me, and I understood, and I didn’t do anything. As her eyes adjusted to the wan starlight, she saw that two other women were already on the darkened patio. One sat on a picnic table. The other stood in front of her, hands on the first woman’s hips. Long and lean.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "I poured out a glass of wine for the bookkeeper, and handed him the box of biscuits. The old man took up the glass with his parchment-coloured hand, and held it up to the light as if he were calculating its chemical properties or its specific weight. Then he sipped it slowly with evident gusto. "As for the wafer he looked at it carefully, just as if it had been a draft he was going to register. "Then we both set to work again, and at about ten, all the letters and dispatches having been answered, I heaved a deep sigh of relief. "'If my manager comes to-morrow, as he said he would, he'll be satisfied with me.' "I smiled as this thought flitted through my brain. What was I working for? Lucre, to please my clerk, or for the work itself? I am sure I hardly knew. I think I laboured for the feverish excitement the work gave me, just as men play at chess to keep their brains active with other thoughts than those that oppress them; or, perhaps, because I was born with working propensities like bees or ants. "Not wanting to keep the poor book-keeper on his stool any longer, I admitted the fact to him that it was time to shut up the office. He got up slowly, with a crepitating sound, took off his spectacles like an automaton, wiped them leisurely, put them in their case, quietly took out another pair—for he had glasses for every occasion—put them on his nose, then looked at me. "'You have gone through a vast amount of work. If your grandfather and your father could have seen you, they surely would have been pleased with you.' "I again poured out two glasses of wine, one of which I handed to him. He quaffed the wine, pleased, not with the wine itself, but for my kindness in offering it to him. Then I shook hands with him, and we parted. "Where was I to go now—home? "I wished my mother had come back. I had got a letter from her that very afternoon; in it she said that, instead of returning in a day or two, as she had intended doing, she might, perhaps, go off to Italy for a short time. She was suffering from a slight attack of bronchitis, and she dreaded the fogs and dampness of our town. "Poor mother! I now thought that, since my intimacy with Teleny, there had been a slight estrangement between us; not that I loved her less, but because Teleny engrossed all my mental and bodily faculties. Still, just now that he was away, I almost felt mother-sick, and I decided to write a long and affectionate letter to her as soon as I got home.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Cole, the reserve of which he saw I had made, was a proof and encouragement to him. But, alas! how easily in the enjoyment of the greatest sweets in life, in present possession, poisoned by the regret of an absent one! But my regret was a mighty and just one, since it had my only truly beloved Charles for its object. Given him up I had, indeed, completely, having never once heard from him since our separation; which, as I found afterwards, had been my misfortune, and not his neglect, for he wrote me several letters which had all miscarried; but forgotten him I never had. And amidst all my personal infidelities, not one had made a pin’s point impression on a heart impenetrable to the true love passion, but for him. As soon, however, as I was mistress of this unexpected fortune, I felt more than ever how dear he was to me, from its insufficiency to make me happy, whilst he was not to share it with me. My earliest care, consequently, was to endeavour at getting some account of him; but all my researches produced me no more light, than that his father had been dead for some time, not so well as even with the world; and that Charles had reached his port of destination in the South Seas, where, finding the estate he was sent to recover, dwindled to a trifle, by the loss of two ships in which the bulk of his uncle’s fortune lay, he was come away with the small remainder, and might, perhaps, according to the best advice, in a few months return to England, from whence he had, at the time of this my inquiry, been absent two years and seven months. A little eternity in love! You cannot conceive with what joy I embraced the hopes thus given me of seeing the delight of my heart again. But, as the term of months was assigned it, in order to divert and amuse my impatience for his return, after settling my affairs with much ease and security, I set out on a journey for Lancashire, with an equipage suitable to my fortune, and with a design purely to revisit my place of nativity, for which I could not help retaining a great tenderness; and might naturally not be sorry to shew myself there, to the advantage I was now in pass to do, after the report Esther Davis had spread of my being spirited away to the plantations; for on no other supposition could she account for the suppression of myself to her, since her leaving me so abruptly at the inn. Another favourite intention I had, to look out for my relations, though I had none but distant ones, and prove a benefactress to them. Then Mrs.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Cole; but indolently given up to ease and the town dissipations, the perpetual hurry of them hindered him from looking into his own affairs, much less to mine. In the mean time, if I may judge from my own experience, none are better paid, or better treated, during their reign, than the mistress of those who, enervate by nature, debaucheries, or age, have the least employment for the sex: sensible that a woman must be satisfied some way, they ply her with a thousand little tender attentions, presents, caresses, confidences, and exhaust their inventions in means and devices to make up for the capital deficiency; and even towards lessening that, what arts, what modes, what refinements of pleasure have they not recourse to, to raise their languid powers, and press nature into the service of their sensuality? But here is their misfortune, that when by a course of teasing, worrying, handling, wanton postures, lascivious motions, they have at length accomplished a flashy enervate enjoyment, they at the same time light up a flame in the object of their passion, that, not having the means themselves to quench, drives her for relief into the next person’s arms, who can finish their work; and thus they become bawds to some favourite, tried and approved of, for a more vigorous and satisfactory execution; for with women, of our turn especially, however well our hearts may be disposed, there is a controlling part, or queen-seat in us, that governs itself by its own maxims of state, amongst which not one is stronger, in practice with it, than, in the matter of is dues, never to accept the will for the deed. Mr.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  Just as I would always love and miss my grandmother, my big sister, and Eugene. Just as I would always love and miss my reservation and my tribe. I hoped and prayed that they would someday forgive me for leaving them. I hoped and prayed that I would someday forgive myself for leaving them. “Ah, man,” Rowdy said. “Stop crying.” “Will we still know each other when we’re old men?” I asked. “Who knows anything?” Rowdy asked. Then he threw me the ball. “Now quit your blubbering,” he said. “And play ball.” I wiped my tears away, dribbled once, twice, and pulled up for a jumper. Rowdy and I played one-on-one for hours. We played until dark. We played until the streetlights lit up the court. We played until the bats swooped down at our heads. We played until the moon was huge and golden and perfect in the dark sky. We didn’t keep score. Discover Your Next Great Read Get sneak peeks, book recommendations, and news about your favorite authors. Tap here to learn more. Contents A NOTE FROM SHERMAN ALEXIE PERSONAL PHOTOS FROM SHERMAN ROWDY, ROWDY, ROWDY A LETTER FROM AN EDUCATOR FAN ARTWORK WATER ON THE BRAIN JESS WALTER INTERVIEWS SHERMAN ALEXIE INTERVIEW WITH ELLEN FORNEY DISCUSSION GUIDE A Note from Sherman Alexie Okay, so you just finished reading The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Maybe it’s the first time you’ve read it. Maybe it’s the hundredth. In any case, thank you for paying attention to my story. Thanks to all of you who’ve paid attention to this book over the last ten years. This novel is a decade old! That seems impossible, right? Time is a trickster. So I guess this Tenth Anniversary Edition of True Diary is like a birthday celebration. And this afterword is like a birthday song. That’s cool. But it should be something bigger than that, as well. I think I should use this afterword to tell you something new about True Diary and some of the people and places and events and ideas that inspired me to write it. Okay? So here we go. The hero of this book is Arnold Spirit Jr. The other hero of this book is Rowdy. I didn’t write Rowdy as a hero. I never intended him to be heroic. But he was not supposed to be a villain, either. He was meant to be a messy and contradictory human: bitter and funny, loyal and angry, loving and vindictive. He was Arnold’s best friend, but he was also going to become Arnold’s worst enemy. And yes, there would be reconciliation, but it would be complicated and competitive. Is there such a thing as antagonistic forgiveness?

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Yet—suddenly the appearance is here again. Behind the green screen through which the moonlight gleams so that it seems embroidered with silver, I again see the white figure, the woman of stone whom I adore, whom I fear and flee. With a couple of leaps I am within the house and catch my breath and reflect. What am I really, a little dilettante or a great big donkey? A sultry morning, the atmosphere is dead, heavily laden with odors, yet stimulating. Again I am sitting in my honey-suckle arbor, reading in the Odyssey about the beautiful witch who transformed her admirers into beasts. A wonderful picture of antique love. There is a soft rustling in the twigs and blades and the pages of my book rustle and on the terrace likewise there is a rustling. A woman’s dress— She is there—Venus—but without furs—No, this time it is merely the widow—and yet—Venus-oh, what a woman! As she stands there in her light white morning gown, looking at me, her slight figure seems full of poetry and grace. She is neither large, nor small; her head is alluring, piquant—in the sense of the period of the French marquises—rather than formally beautiful. What enchantment and softness, what roguish charm play about her none too small mouth! Her skin is so infinitely delicate, that the blue veins show through everywhere; even through the muslin covering her arms and bosom. How abundant her red hair-it is red, not blonde or golden-yellow—how diabolically and yet tenderly it plays around her neck! Now her eyes meet mine like green lightnings—they are green, these eyes of hers, whose power is so indescribable—green, but as are precious stones, or deep unfathomable mountain lakes. She observes my confusion, which has even made me discourteous, for I have remained seated and still have my cap on my head. She smiles roguishly. Finally I rise and bow to her. She comes closer, and bursts out into a loud, almost childlike laughter. I stammer, as only a little dilettante or great big donkey can do on such an occasion. Thus our acquaintance began. The divinity asks for my name, and mentions her own. Her name is Wanda von Dunajew. And she is actually my Venus. “But madame, what put the idea into your head?” “The little picture in one of your books—” “I had forgotten about it.” “The curious notes on its back—” “Why curious?” She looked at me. “I have always wanted to know a real dreamer some time—for the sake of the change—and you seem one of the maddest of the tribe.” “Dear lady—in fact—” Again I fell victim to an odious, asinine stammering, and in addition blushed in a way that might have been appropriate for a youngster of sixteen, but not for me, who was almost a full ten years older— “You were afraid of me last night.” “Really—of course—but won’t you sit down?”

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Feather lay curled on their side. The rain beat down on their smooth skin where Ramona’s mouth had left an archipelago of bruises two nights earlier. Don’t tell me you love me. I won’t believe you. She fumbled a cigarette from the case in the pocket of her fatigues and lit it with trembling fingers, to have something to do. The Maenad was calling another case. Another name. More women being dragged out to the gulley where the dead lay bloodied. Feather’s big brown eyes, soft, like a cow’s. A hail of lead, and we die in each other’s arms. It was so easy to cross that bloody stretch of concrete and mount up the steps, exchanging hellos and the quick, forceful gripping of arms that had become the norm among the sisterhood. So easy to tell Karin to wait in the cavernous, echoing lobby with its empty desks and rectangular pools of rain-slashed daylight. She seemed to fly like a zephyr up the stairs to the seventh floor, boots hardly touching the steps, soaring down the hall to the doors of Teach’s office where a pair of Maenads stood guard, P-90s cradled in their arms. They opened the doors for her and she went in. Teach was at her desk, Andrea Kilroy leaning over her shoulder to point at something laid out on it. The Maenad straightened and saluted, fist over her heart. Ramona did the same. Teach’s gaze flicked up to meet hers. Rain beat against the long window behind her. “Glad you could join us, captain,” she said with a hint of gentle reproach. “Run into traffic?” Ramona blushed. “The crowd outside, ma’am. I let myself get distracted.” Teach scribbled something in the cloth-bound composition book laid open on her desk. Its pages looked clean and crisp beneath the cover of her scratchy, indecipherable handwriting; the first new paper Ramona had seen in weeks, probably from one of the little mill towns along the Merrimack. “Yes,” she said. “Molly’s people found, well, I don’t know what you’d call it—a hive, let’s say, of male prostitutes in womanface. But that’s not why I called you here.” She flipped the page and smoothed it down gently. “I want you in Raymond tomorrow for the labor signing. Shake hands. See how things are coming with the brat’s people. She’s been compliant so far, but a degenerate like that … you can’t be too careful.” Ramona wondered idly how much longer she could last before she started screaming, before whatever was churning under this glacier of cool calm broke out into the world and dashed itself to bloody hamburger against whatever was closest to hand. A hundred trans women watched them from the walls. Dead eyes. Judgment.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  Think about it. Adam and Eve wanted to smooch. Hamlet wanted to avenge his father. Harriet Tubman wanted freedom. Luke Skywalker wanted to find his father. But I’m getting carried away with all the hating and the wanting. I want you to like me, maybe even to love me. Heck, we all want to be liked and loved. But you can’t jump around like a stray dog and tell people that you want to be liked and loved. And past the age of ten, you certainly can’t ask to be liked or loved. That’s just desperate. But, hey, wait a minute, I am desperate. So what can I do to make you love me? Should I pull a rabbit out of a hat? Read poems to you? Juggle chainsaws? Draw cartoons? [image "A person with glasses is juggling a rabbit, a book titled ‘Poems About Pine Trees,’ and a chainsaw. Speech bubbles say ‘LOVE ME!’ multiple times." file=image_rsrc4TS.jpg] I drew a cartoon just for you. Does it make you happy? Or sad? Or just plain confused? Well, let me make something clear. I am happy and sad and confused all at the same time. I always feel clumsy. No, I always feel awkward. “Awkward” is a better word. “Awkward” is the perfect word for what I feel like. And I always feel like I’m going to bump into something and break my collarbone or my heart. But there I go again, talking about my life like it’s a soap opera. And I hate soap operas. So I must confess that my life on the rez is not so horrible. It’s actually pretty decent. If I had to guess, I’d say my life is about 52 percent good and 48 percent bad, and that’s a dang good score in a world where approximately 90 percent of the people are 90 percent sad. So I should probably stop whining. After all, I am loved and I do love. And I’ll prove it, too. These are the eight things that I love with all my heart and soul: my grandmother my mother and father (the parental units count as one) my big sister math (especially geometry) my best friend drawing cartoons any sport involving a ball the beautiful girl named X Jess Walter Interviews Sherman AlexieNote: This interview has been abridged. The full interview is available in the audiobook edition. Sherman Alexie: Hello, everybody, this is Sherman Alexie. I’m sitting in the studio with Jess Walter, and we’re going to have a discussion about the tenth anniversary edition of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. I’m laughing because I just did an event in Oregon and the Oregon State librarian couldn’t remember the title and called it The Partially Part-Time True Story of a Full-Time Worker or something.…[Laughs] I get into trouble with my long titles.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "Having her a retro, his whole thoughts were thus concentrated upon me; and the tightness of the orifice in which the penis was sheathed, added to the titillation produced by the lips of the womb, gave him such an overpowering sensation that he redoubled his strength, and shoved his muscular instrument with such mighty strokes that the frail woman shook under the repeated thumps. Her knees were almost giving way under the brutal force he displayed. When again, all at once, the flood-gates of the seminal ducts were open, and he squirted a jet of molten liquid down into the innermost recesses of her womb. "A moment of delirium followed; the contraction of all her muscles gripped him and sucked him up eagerly, greedily; and after a short spasmodic convulsion, they both fell senseless side by side, still tightly wedged in one another." "And so ends the Epistle!" "Not quite so, for nine months afterwards the Countess gave birth to a fine boy" "Who, of course, looked like his father? Doesn't every child look like its father?" "Still this one happened to look neither like the Count nor like Teleny." "Who the deuce did it look like then?" "Like myself." "Bosh!" "Bosh as much as you like. Anyhow, the rickety old count is very proud of this son of his, having discovered a certain likeness between his only heir and the portrait of one of his ancestors. He is always pointing out this atavism to all his visitors; but whenever he struts about, and begins to expound learnedly over the matter, I am told that the Countess shrugs her shoulders and puckers down her lips contemptuously, as if she was not quite convinced of the fact." CHAPTER V"YOU have not yet told me when you met Teleny, or how your meeting was brought about." "Just have a little patience, and you will know all. You can understand that after I had seen the Countess leave his house at dawn, bearing on her face the expression of the emotions she had felt, I was anxious to get rid of my criminal infatuation. "At times I even persuaded myself that I did not care for Réné any more. Only when I thought that all my love had vanished, he had but to look at me, and I felt it gush back stronger than ever, filling my heart and bereaving me of my reason. "I could find no rest either night or day. "I thereupon made up my mind not to see Teleny again, nor to attend any of his concerts; but lovers' resolutions are like April showers, and at the last minute the slightest excuse was good enough to make me waver and change my decision. "I was, moreover, curious and anxious to know if the Countess or anybody else would go to meet him again, and pass the night with him." "Well, and were these visits repeated?"

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  In you there is a certain depth and capacity for enthusiasm and a deep seriousness, which delight me. I might learn to love you.” After a short but severe shower we went out together to the meadow and the statue of Venus. All about us the earth steamed; mists rose up toward heaven like clouds of incense; a shattered rainbow still hovered in the air. The trees were still shedding drops, but sparrows and finches were already hopping from twig to twig. They are twittering gaily, as if very much pleased at something. Everything is filled with a fresh fragrance. We cannot cross the meadow for it is still wet. In the sunlight it looks like a small pool, and the goddess of love seems to rise from the undulations of its mirror-like surface. About her head a swarm of gnats is dancing, which, illuminated by the sun, seem to hover above her like an aureole. Wanda is enjoying the lovely scene. As all the benches along the walk are still wet, she supports herself on my arm to rest a while. A soft weariness permeates her whole being, her eyes are half closed; I feel the touch of her breath on my cheek. How I managed to get up courage enough I really don’t know, but I took hold of her hand, asking, “Could you love me?” “Why not,” she replied, letting her calm, clear look rest upon me, but not for long. A moment later I am kneeling before her, pressing my burning face against the fragrant muslin of her gown. “But Severin—this isn’t right,” she cried. But I take hold of her little foot, and press my lips upon it. “You are getting worse and worse!” she cried. She tore herself free, and fled rapidly toward the house, the while her adorable slipper remained in my hand. Is it an omen? * * * * * All day long I didn’t dare to go near her. Toward evening as I was sitting in my arbor her gay red head peered suddenly through the greenery of her balcony. “Why don’t you come up?” he called down impatiently. I ran upstairs, and at the top lost courage again. I knocked very lightly. She didn’t say come-in, but opened the door herself, and stood on the threshold. “Where is my slipper?” “It is—I have—I want,” I stammered. “Get it, and then we will have tea together, and chat.” When I returned, she was engaged in making tea. I ceremoniously placed the slipper on the table, and stood in the corner like a child awaiting punishment.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  For weeks, I’d practiced the cool indifference I’d greet her with if she ever came back. But when I saw that beaver coat hem swirl around her calves like so much sea foam, all my resolve washed away. I slammed out the door and bounded toward her. I would have reached her first, too, had not Lecia shoved me down in the flower bed crowded with English ivy. They’d come to pick up some clothes, Mother told Daddy. No more was said in the way of plan or explanation. If he knew she was coming before, he hadn’t let on. He leaned on the far porch while she stooped down to hug me, that coat soft as any bunny and exuding Shalimar. “I miss you, baby,” she said. She eyed Daddy over my shoulder the way you’d check the chain length of a tethered hound before you stepped in his yard. He didn’t flinch under the gaze. He stayed rock still, but gave her wide berth. Eventually, she and Hector set about dragging dresses by armloads to the car, trailing hangers all down the yard and walk. If the pope had advanced on us, outfitted in embroidered robes with acolytes behind wagging gold incense burners, the neighbors would have been held in less thrall. No sooner had that low yellow car halted in its tracks than every family on the block started from their various houses, prepared to stay a while, wearing wind-breakers and winter jackets and rain slickers in case the fat clouds overhead broke open. They pulled their lawn chairs out of garage storage, aimed them to face us, and sat watching like we were some drive-in movie projected across the soft gray horizon. The misty rain that speckled the air didn’t stop them. Mrs. Dillard just unfolded her clear plastic rain bonnet from its tuckaway pocket and tied it right under her chin, so her hairdo wouldn’t get sticky. Mrs. Sharp wielded the massive black umbrella they toted to football games. The men who weren’t working stood together under the eaves of the Carters’ garage, smoking, the red coals of their cigarettes visible when drawn on. They were watching too. Don’t think they weren’t. The kids scampered behind their front-yard ditches like nothing special was happening, all but Carol Sharp, who crossed the street to stand right at the edge of our yard. I gave her the finger in full view of everybody. That set her loping back to tattle, her Keds slapping against the wet asphalt. I walked back and forth along the ditch’s slope till it struck me that I’d once seen a cow dog patrol its territory with the exact same level of concentration I was bringing to bear. Mother and Hector toted some more dresses out the house. They were made of silk, colors of whipped cream and beige and palest tangerine shimmering in the gauzy air.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  But actually he rode horses as a way to build up his muscles and his confidence. And one day as he was riding, the horse trainer said that my son was “borrowing the strength of the horse until he could find his own.” So I’m not calling Randy a horse here, but I think that I borrowed his strength. I think I absolutely needed to borrow his strength in Wellpinit, on the reservation, until I found my own strength off the reservation. And you guys mostly know what happened in high school. I became a basketball star in Reardan. Eventually, Randy left Wellpinit a couple years after I did. He went back to school in Springdale and became a basketball star, too. We never played each other in high school, though, because his teams were terrible and my teams were good. Ha! I had to talk trash one more time. You see, at Reardan, I played with white boys who were good at basketball. At Springdale, Randy played with white boys who weren’t good. Ha! Randy and I became friendly again over the years, mostly because of basketball. In all-star high school tournaments. And then in all-Indian tournaments after high school. I remember when I hit two clutch free throws to beat his team in an all-Indian tournament in Springdale. He was so mad at losing but so happy that I’d hit the game winner. Laughing, he picked me up, slung me over his shoulder, and ran me around the gym. Then he carried me outside, through the gym doors, and threw me into a snowbank. I saw him only once or twice when we were in college. One night, during my last semester at Washington State University, I boozed my way to the reservation, to Wellpinit. I was depressed. And struggling with my bipolar mental illness. I didn’t know I was bipolar. I wouldn’t be officially diagnosed for twenty more years. I was getting drunk every weekend. I was falling apart. I don’t remember how Randy and I ended up together that night. But we drove drunk around the reservation for hours and crashed five or six or eight parties. It’s all a blur. At some point, in somebody’s house on the rez, I stood and started reciting my poems from memory. In those early days, I could recite all of my poems by heart. So there I was, drunkenly reciting my poems about life on the reservation while standing in a house on my reservation. I would publish my first book, The Business of Fancydancing, eighteen months later. And my future wife, the love of my life, would attend my first reading of that book in Spokane a few weeks after that. I also got sober in March 2001 and have been sober ever since.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  And here, Madam, I ought, perhaps, to make you an apology for this minute detail of things, that dwelt so strongly upon my memory, after so deep an impression; but, besides that this intrigue bred one great revolution in my life, which historical truth requires I should not sink from you, may I not presume that so exalted a pleasure ought not to be ungratefully forgotten, or suppressed by me, because I found it in a character in low life; where, by the by, it is oftener met with, purer, and more unsophisticated, than among the false, ridiculous refinements with which the great suffer themselves to be so grossly cheated by their pride: the great! than whom, there exist few amongst those they call the vulgar, who are more ignorant of, or who cultivate less, the art of living than they do; they, I say, who for ever mistake things the most foreign to the nature of pleasure itself; whose capital favourite object is enjoyment of beauty, wherever that rare invaluable gift is found, without distinction of birth, or station. As love never had, so now revenge had no longer any share in my commerce in this handsome youth. The sole pleasures of enjoyment were now the link I held to him by: for though nature had done such great maters for him in his outward form, and especially in that superb piece of furniture she had so liberally enriched him with; though he was thus qualified to give the senses their richest feast, still there was something more wanting to create in me, and constitute the passion of love. Yet Will had very good qualities too: gentle, tractable, and, above all, grateful; silentious, even to a fault: he spoke, at any time, very little, but made it up emphatically with action; and, to do him justice, he never gave me the least reason to complain, either of any tendency to encroach upon me for the liberties I allowed him, or of his indiscretion in blabbing them. There is, then, a fatality in love, or have loved him I must; for he was really a treasure, a bit for the Bonne Bouche of a duchess; and, to say the truth, my liking for him was so extreme, that it was distinguishing very nicely to deny that I loved him. My happiness, however, with him did not last long, but found an end from my own imprudent neglect. After having taken even superfluous precautions against a discovery, our success in repeated meetings emboldened me to omit the barely necessary ones. About a month after our first intercourse, one fatal morning (the season Mr.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Chapter 13"Oh! Monsieur," I responded, weeping, "you would deprive an unfortunate of her fondest hope were you to wither in her heart this religion which is her whole comfort. Firmly attached to its teachings, absolutely convinced that all the blows leveled against it are nothing but libertinage's effects and the passions', am I to sacrifice, to blasphemies, to sophistries horrible to me, my heart's sweetest sustenance ?" I added a thousand other arguments to this one, they merely caused the Count to laugh, and his captious principles, nourished by a more male eloquence, supported by readings and studies I, happily, had never performed, daily attacked my own principles, without shaking them. Madame de Bressac, that woman filled with piety and virtue, was not unaware her nephew justified his wild behavior with every one of the day's paradoxes; she too often shuddered upon hearing them; and as she condescended to attribute somewhat more good sense to me than to her other women, she would sometimes take me aside and speak of her chagrin. Meanwhile, her nephew, champing at the bit, had reached the point where he no longer bothered to hide his malign intentions; not only had he surrounded his aunt with all of that dangerous canaille which served his pleasures, but he had even carried boldness so far as to declare to her, in my presence, that were she to take it into her head to frustrate his appetite, he would convince her of their charm by practicing them before her very eyes. I trembled; I beheld this conduct with horror. I strove to rationalize my reactions by attributing their origin to personal motives, for I wished to stifle the unhappy passion which burned in my soul; but is love an illness to be cured? All I endeavored to oppose to it merely fanned its flames, and the perfidious Count never appeared more lovable to me than when I had assembled before me everything which ought to have induced me to hate him. I had remained four years in this household unrelentingly persecuted by the same sorrows, forever consoled by the same sweetnesses, when this abominable man, finally believing himself sure of me, dared disclose his infamous schemes.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  This event also created a chasm in our little society, which Mrs. Cole, on the foot of her usual caution, was in no haste to fill up; but then it redoubled her attention to procure me, in the advantages of a traffic for a counterfeit maidenhead, some consolation for the sort of widowhood I had been left in; and this was a scheme she had never lost prospect of, and only waited for a proper person to bring it to bear with. But I was, it seems, fated to be my own caterer in this, as I had been in my first trial of the market. I had now passed near a month in the enjoyment of all the pleasures of familiarity and society with my companions, whose particular favourites (the baronet excepted, who soon after took Harriet home) had all, on the terms of community established in the house, solicited the gratification of their taste for variety in my embraces; but I had with the utmost art and address, on various pretexts, eluded their pursuit, without giving them cause to complain; and this reserve I used neither out of dislike of them, nor disgust of the thing, but my true reason was my attachment to my own, and my tenderness of invading the choice of my companions, who outwardly exempt, as they seemed, from jealousy, could not but in secret like me the better for the regard I had for, without making a merit of it to them. Thus easy, and beloved by the whole family, did I get on; when one day, that, about five in the afternoon, I stepped over to a fruit shop in Covent Garden, to pick some table fruit for myself and the young women, I met with the following adventure. Whilst I was chaffering for the fruit I wanted, I observed myself followed by a young gentleman, whose rich dress first attracted my notice; for the rest, he had nothing remarkable in his person, except that he was pale, thin-made, and ventured himself upon legs rather of the slenderest. Easy was it to perceive, without seeming to perceive it, that it was me he wanted to be at; and keeping his eyes fixed on me, till he came to the same basket that I stood at, and cheapening, or rather giving the first price asked for the fruit, began his approaches. Now most certainly I was not at all out of figure to pass for a modest girl.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  A few more martinis than usual got poured from the silver shaker every night. Rumor was he took up with his nurse. What happened? I was riveted. “We worked it out,” she said. “It passed.” But not before his Cadillac plowed over her bicycle one drunken night and her mother threatened divorce. Like me, she’d lain awake and felt the metaphorical foundations of her family shake as her parents roared around in the masks of monsters. Not everybody I met reported such chaotic times as mere blips in the family timeline. One guy’s drug dealer parents dragged him across many borders with bags of heroin taped under his Dr. Denton’s. Another woman had, at age five, watched her alcoholic mother hang herself while the girl fought to shield her toddler brother’s eyes. These stories exploded the myth that such turbulent family dramas condemn you to a life curled up in the back ward of a mental institution. Most of these folks seemed—on the surface at least—to have gotten over their troubled upbringings without blocking them out. The female therapist in a Portland bookstore talked specifically about the power of narrative in her life. She’d been raised by a chronic schizophrenic, her school clothes selected by God himself instructing her mom from the radio. The girl got adept (as I had) at worming her way into other people’s houses. In college she fought depression with therapy. At fifty, she wore a Burberry raincoat and was happily married with grown kids. Plus she was in close touch with her own mother, whose mood swings had gotten better with new medications and the lessening of stress that old age brought. The lady in Chicago survived, she told me, through stories. Which is at the core of traditional therapy: retelling the family saga. Talk about it, the old wisdom says, and you get better. From narratives about childhood, this woman manufactured a self, neither cut off from her past nor mired in it. In our solitary longing for some reassurance that we’re behaving okay inside fairly isolated families, personal experience has the possibility to transform both the tellers of it and the listeners to it. Just as the novel form once took up experiences of urban industrialized society that weren’t being addressed in sermons or epistles or epic poems, so memoir—with its single, intensely personal voice—wrestles with family issues in a way readers of late find compelling. The good ones confirm my experience in a flawed family. They feed us the way the bread of communion does, with a nourishment that seems to form new flesh. According to other writers in my own informal poll, Liars’ Club —and Cherry —are documentably odd not so much in the boatload of mail they generated (the bestseller’s blessing/curse), but in the length and intensity of letters.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  209 monastic Reform Lecture 29 T he split between East and West in the 11 th century occasioned by the filioque controversy shows how independent the Catholic tradition, headed by the pope, had become from the imperial Orthodox tradition. In the West, the world shaped by popes, kings, and monks was called simply “Christendom,” and it was a world that was pervasively and profoundly Christian in coloration if not always in character. From the 10 th through the 12th centuries, moreover, monasticism was the dominant formal expression of Christianity in the Catholic West, with hundreds of separate communities and many thousands of adherents. In this lecture, we’ll look at three famous monastic houses of the medieval period and the forms of reform and renewal each represented. The Appeal of the Monastic Life • For people today, even many Christians, the appeal of the monastic life is difficult to understand. A life apart from the pleasures of society and in pursuit of God does not meet contemporary standards of happiness or fulfillment. • Here is where some historical imagination helps. In fact, the medieval understanding of the world and the meaning of life illustrates the attraction of monastic life and makes intelligible its great success across centuries. o The Venerable Bede, recounting a story on the brevity of human life (History II, 13), commented, “The life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant.” Christianity revealed what went before and what came after—above all, what awaited humans after death. o Thus, the short and mostly painful time given to humans was considered to be a period of preparation for an eternal destiny;

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  The house in which I live stands in a sort of park, or forest, or wilderness, whatever one wants to call it, and is very solitary. Its sole inhabitants are myself, a widow from Lemberg, and Madame Tartakovska, who runs the house, a little old woman, who grows older and smaller each day. There are also an old dog that limps on one leg, and a young cat that continually plays with a ball of yarn. This ball of yarn, I believe, belongs to the widow. She is said to be really beautiful, this widow, still very young, twenty-four at the most, and very rich. She dwells in the first story, and I on the ground floor. She always keeps the green blinds drawn, and has a balcony entirely overgrown with green climbing-plants. I for my part down below have a comfortable, intimate arbor of honeysuckle, in which I read and write and paint and sing like a bird among the twigs. I can look up on the balcony. Sometimes I actually do so, and then from time to time a white gown gleams between the dense green network. Really the beautiful woman up there doesn’t interest me very much, for I am in love with someone else, and terribly unhappy at that; far more unhappy than the Knight of Toggenburg or the Chevalier in Manon l’Escault, because the object of my adoration is of stone. In the garden, in the tiny wilderness, there is a graceful little meadow on which a couple of deer graze peacefully. On this meadow is a stone statue of Venus, the original of which, I believe, is in Florence. This Venus is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in all my life. That, however, does not signify much, for I have seen few beautiful women, or rather few women at all. In love too, I am a dilettante who never got beyond the preparation, the first act. But why talk in superlatives, as if something that is beautiful could be surpassed? It is sufficient to say that this Venus is beautiful. I love her passionately with a morbid intensity; madly as one can only love a woman who never responds to our love with anything but an eternally uniform, eternally calm, stony smile. I literally adore her. I often lie reading under the leafy covering of a young birch when the sun broods over the forest. Often I visit that cold, cruel mistress of mine by night and lie on my knees before her, with the face pressed against the cold pedestal on which her feet rest, and my prayers go up to her. The rising moon, which just now is waning, produces an indescribable effect. It seems to hover among the trees and submerges the meadow in its gleam of silver.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  But I missed Rowdy. I kept looking at the door. For the last ten years, he’d always come over to the house to have a pumpkin-pie eating contest with me. I missed him. So I drew a cartoon of Rowdy and me like we used to be: [image "An illustration of two superheroes, with R and A respectively on their chests, fist bumping." file=image_rsrc4SH.jpg] Then I put on my coat and shoes, walked over to Rowdy’s house, and knocked on the door. Rowdy’s dad, drunk as usual, opened the door. “Junior,” he said. “What do you want?” “Is Rowdy home?” “Nope.” “Oh, well, I drew this for him. Can you give it to him?” Rowdy’s dad took the cartoon and stared at it for a while. Then he smirked. “You’re kind of gay, aren’t you?” he asked. Yeah, that was the guy who was raising Rowdy. Jesus, no wonder my best friend was always so angry. “Can you just give it to him?” I asked. “Yeah, I’ll give it to him. Even if it’s a little gay.” I wanted to cuss at him. I wanted to tell him that I thought I was being courageous, and that I was trying to fix my broken friendship with Rowdy, and that I missed him, and if that was gay, then okay, I was the gayest dude in the world. But I didn’t say any of that. “Okay, thank you,” I said instead. “And Happy Thanksgiving.” Rowdy’s dad closed the door on me. I walked away. But I stopped at the end of the driveway and looked back. I could see Rowdy in the window of his upstairs bedroom. He was holding my cartoon. He was watching me walk away. And I could see the sadness in his face. I just knew he missed me, too. I waved at him. He gave me the finger. “Hey, Rowdy!” I shouted. “Thanks a lot!” He stepped away from the window. And I felt sad for a moment. But then I realized that Rowdy may have flipped me off, but he hadn’t torn up my cartoon. As much as he hated me, he probably should have ripped it to pieces. That would have hurt my feelings more than just about anything I can think of. But Rowdy still respected my cartoons. And so maybe he still respected me a little bit. Hunger Pains [image file=image_rsrc4RJ.jpg] Our history teacher, Mr. Sheridan, was trying to teach us something about the Civil War. But he was so boring and monotonous that he was only teaching us how to sleep with our eyes open. I had to get out of there, so I raised my hand. “What is it, Arnold?” the teacher asked. “I have to go the bathroom.” “Hold it.” “I can’t.” I put on my best If-I-Don’t-Go-Now-I’m-Going-To-Explode face. “Do you really have to?” the teacher asked. I didn’t have to go at first, but then I realized that yes, I did have to go.