roman

When I was younger, I would cling to life because life was at the top of the turning wheel. But like the song of my gypsy girl, the great wheel turns over and lands on a minor key. It is then that you come of age and life means nothing to you. To live, to die, to overdose, to fall in a coma in the street... it is all the same. It is only in the peach innocence of youth that life is at its crest on top of the wheel. And there being only life, the young cling to it, they fear death_ And they should! ...For they are 'in' life.

...to be able to enjoy the life you have spent, is to live it twice.

The world is mere change, and this life, opinion.

The first draft doesn't have to be perfect, but it does have to be written!

_, Wanderess, WanderessWhen did you feel your most euphoric kiss? Was I the source of your greatest bliss?

The moment her hymen was plucked from her body in the wilderness, Her soul was taken from sanity.

Favoring 'resolution' the way we do, it is hard for us men to write great love stories. Why?, because we want to tell too much. We aren__ satisfied unless at the end of the story the characters are lying there, panting.

I ran across an excerpt today (in English translation) of some dialogue/narration from the modern popular writer, Paulo Coelho in his book: Aleph.(Note: bracketed text is mine.)... 'I spoke to three scholars,' [the character says 'at last.'] ...two of them said that, after death, the [sic (misprint, fault of the publisher)] just go to Paradise. The third one, though, told me to consult some verses from the Koran. [end quote]' ...I can see that he's excited. [narrator]' ...Now I have many positive things to say about Coelho: He is respectable, inspiring as a man, a truth-seeker, and an appealing writer; but one should hesitate to call him a 'literary' writer based on this quote. A 'literary' author knows that a character's excitement should be 'shown' in his or her dialogue and not in the narrator's commentary on it. Advice for Coelho: Remove the 'I can see that he's excited' sentence and show his excitement in the phrasing of his quote.(Now, in defense of Coelho, I am firmly of the opinion, having myself written plenty of prose that is flawed, that a novelist should be forgiven for slipping here and there.)Lastly, it appears that a belief in reincarnation is of great interest to Mr. Coelho ... Just think! He is a man who has achieved, (as Leonard Cohen would call it), 'a remote human possibility.' He has won lots of fame and tons of money. And yet, how his preoccupation with reincarnation__one other than an interest in being born again as somebody else__uggests that he is not happy!

The word Familia did not originally signify the ideal of our modern philistine, which is a compound of sentimentality and domestic discord. Among the Romans, in the beginning, it did not even refer to the married couple and their children, but to the slaves alone. Famulus means a household slave and familia signifies the totality of slaves belonging to one individual. The expression was invented by the romans to describe a new social organism, the head of which had under him wife and children and a number of slaves, under Roman paternal power, with power of life and death over them all.

Hey, if you'd wanted to avoid 'this,' you shouldn't have lured me last night. Now it's too late. You might as well avoid the long, drawn-out pain and get it over with quickly. Sort of like taking off a Band-Aid. Or cutting off a limb.""Wow, who says there's no romance left in the world?

If I have played my part well, clap your hands, and dismiss me with applause from the stage.

Have I have played my part well in the comedy of life? If so, clap your hands and dismiss me from the stage with applause.

Discover how to visit the past and bring yesterday's stories into our lives today

When he, whoever of the gods it was, had thus arranged in order and resolved that chaotic mass, and reduced it, thus resolved, to cosmic parts, he first moulded the Earth into the form of a mighty ball so that it might be of like form on every side _ And, that no region might be without its own forms of animate life, the stars and divine forms occupied the floor of heaven, the sea fell to the shining fishes for their home, Earth received the beasts, and the mobile air the birds _ Then Man was born:_ though all other animals are prone, and fix their gaze upon the earth, he gave to Man an uplifted face and bade him stand erect and turn his eyes to heaven.

I am supposed to be an utter fool and the more I read the more of a fool they think me.

You have been missing from me for far too long.

This was how it was with travel: one city gives you gifts, another robs you. One gives you the heart__ affections, the other destroys your soul. Cities and countries are as alive, as feeling, as fickle and uncertain as people. Their degrees of love and devotion are as varying as with any human relation. Just as one is good, another is bad.

Fortune's fool! How we humans lie upon beauty like lizards upon a sun-baked rock.