Despite your delusions to the contrary, swingers, by and large, are a civilized lot. We come in all ages, shapes, sizes, nationalities, and ethnicities. We have differing beliefs, varying opinions, IQs, and senses of humor....

After a lifetime of soft, easy living in the West, one’s buttocks take an awful hammering out here. Backpacking around India is just one long round of sitting on bone-hard, chafing, bruising and generally uncomfortable...

I’ll enjoy today while it’s here, using the time wisely. Each day is a gift that soon becomes a memory.

The things that make you a functional citizen in society – manners, discretion, cordiality – don’t necessarily make you a good writer. Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels...

Never in our silent moments of illusion do we sense the dark parallel that lives next to us. Nor do we suspect the carrier.

An intensely gripping narrative…expertly crafted and totally addictive…a must read!

Mine is a gruesome job, but for a scientist with a love for the mechanics of the human body, a great one.

My brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour them in. We each have our own cheap-mail-order paintbox, and our favourite hues. Thus, I remembered Grandma a few pages ago...

…if that energy could have been channelled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years.

Mistakes? That’s why they put erasers on pencils.

The Element of Surprise is their in every day,It’s when you wake up.

Success is not due to spontaneous combustion. You have to set yourself on fire.

A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist’s world.

The griefs that have been hardest for me were the ones I didn’t recognize as griefs, because they came in what were supposed to be the best times of my life. No one whispered in...

Everyone has a colorful life. You just have to get out your crayons.

His eyes are so clear and blue that nothing but clichés enter my mind.

I had never read a book written by an African-American. I didn’t know that black people could write books. I didn’t know that blacks had done any great things. I was always conscious of my...

I put a positive spin on a difficult childhood in my 10 essays. Available on Amazon.com.

Live life carefully but save time for fun.

You have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere...

In the deep Mysteries of the world, their belong time, still unexplored and to be explored.

That’s the thing about social drinking: In the end, it’s the drinking that creates the scene, not the other way around. You grow to relish the buzz, regardless of the situation. Once you’re there, really...

There is nothing opposed in Biometry and Mendelism. Your husband and I worked that out at Peppards [on the Chilterns] and you will see it referred in the Biometrika memoir. The Mendelian formula leads up...

Incarceration is the way a woman is expected to date like a soccer goalie, shuffling back and forth to block the balls constantly flying in her direction and shamed the moment she lets one slip...

I have a remarkable ability to delete all better judgement from my brain when I get my head set on something. I have no sense of moderation, no sense of caution. I have no sense...

She has learned to love. To fear. To hate. And then to love again. Through it all, she writes.” ~Once Upon A Time There Was A Girl

They had buried him under our elm tree, they said — yet this was not totally true. For he really lay buried in my heart.

He was a simple honest man. He never strayed,He never drank, he never smoked, and he never kissed a maid.And when he passed away his insurance was denied,Because he never lived, they claimed he never...

Not everyone is capable of sacrificing his own life. So it is, always has been and always will be.

perfect.” I wasn’t sure what bothered me more; the fact that I had no control over the changes of my body and hair or that this horrible situation was only happening to me.

I name you today, heart fears. I am small, but you are smaller. You will not stop me. You have a voice, fears, and I must listen, but then I will open my heart. I...

I can’t say for sure if I’m better off, since I have no way of knowing what would have been. I could have traveled to exotic places and kissed exotic men in the moonlight. Or...

I carried with me into the West End Bar, the White Horse Tavern, a long list of things I would never do: I would never have my hair set in a beauty parlor. I would...

Her lips full and inviting, she has an infectious laugh and glassy cackle in her eyes, and a 2000 volt sexual charisma that beckons me like a fluff girl on scuffed knees.

There were signs everywhere but none that I could read or even hope to decipher. These multi-lined symbols unhinged my familiar world.

It isn’t enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn’t anecdote. It’s the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. For what happened in the story to transcend the...

If you are a twin, you watch yourself live two lives–yours and hers. It’s constant comparison. I am never as good as the bad I wanted her to be. I was the only soldier I...

Most German perpetrators were never punished or rewarded for their behavior, but they had learned something about themselves. They know what they did or didn’t do in the most morally fraught moment of their lives....

The greatest gift that anyone can give anyone is LIFE. And the greatest sin a person can do is to take away that life. NEXT to that, all rules and religions in the worldare secondary,...

I thought of my sweet little girl and her chubby cheeks, big brown eyes and long brown hair with bangs that constantly needed trimming. She was all that really mattered in this world, and I...

Chasing angels or fleeing demons, go to the mountains.

…tethered to the ground by quotidian conversation…. the window rosy with anemic November light.

This is a work of memory — facts have been altered. Names have been changed.

autism is more like retina patterns than measles

Tell the truth, or someone will tell it for you.

Having a blood family means suddenly revising a definition of family that I have, over many years, learned to accept. How can I hold both concepts in my mind or find room for both families...

Have you ever gotten to a point where you looked at your own life, thought “Fu** this,” and reached for the economy-sized Valium? Ah, suicide. So dark and seductive.

Work hard. “Suit yourself, then you’ll know at least one person is pleased.

Can they admit it? And will they let me admit it too?

Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family,...