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It was all a bit of a blur.
you haven’t really told me anything about those difficylties.
All I can see, from the few morsels you’ve shared with me is that you’re having a big adventure up there.
As far as I can tell you arrived to a hero’s welcome. USIC drives you to the Oasans and picks you up again when you’re ready for a rest. Your congregation all love Jesus already and think you’re the bee’s knees and want nothing from you but Bible study. You supervise building works while getting a suntan and every now and then somebody brings you a painting to hang up on the ceiling.
“Hey, you’ll feel better soon. It’s all perceptual. Chemical, even. Feeling down, feeling up, it’s a cycle.
They should be sleeping together.
Being apart was wrong. Simply lying side by side did more for a relationship than words.
a nest of animal ...
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Words could be misunderstood, whereas loving companio...
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The simplemindedness of the question irked her.
you’re acting like a little boy who feels the whole universe has collapsed when his mother is angry with him but who then feels everything is all right again when she says she loves him.
Our love can’t be erased by a bit of unhappiness. But that doesn’t mean our love can cure unhappiness, either.
unable or unwilling to offer me emotional support.
this was a distortion, a tragic misconception. It was the frenzy of the moth butting against the lightbulb when there was an open window nearby. God was that open window.
The Oasans knew nothing about money and recognized no difference between vocation and employment.
The whole parable was untranslatable.
As he thought more, however, his urge to argue dwindled and all that was left was love.
She was overwhelmed, she was in distress, she needed help. Rightness or wrongness was not the point. Giving her strength was the point.
A barrage of suffering borne in unaccustomed loneliness had weakened her faith.
Rhetoric and arguments were useless and, in the circumstances, cruel.
perhaps he’d grown accustomed to the humidity at last.
Snowdonia.
In foreign phrases, exotic power lurked.
The lack of self-absorption he’d noted in these people from the outset went deep into the language itself:
there were no words for most of the emotions that humans devoted endless energy to describing.
a neutral recognition that life wasn’t turning out as planned.
Faith, hope, intention, objective, desire, plan, wish, the future, the road ahead … these were all the same thing, apparently.
Funny how a service you’re accustomed to paying a few pence for (in tax) suddenly seems cheap at a hundred times the price.
Chocolate and cashmere pullovers.
Only the most swollen, senile specimens were chosen.