Severe isn't a word normally associated with a cold. Severe is for weather or third-degree burns...No one responds 'severe' when someone asks how her cold is. In fact, nine out of ten Americans respond to 'How's your cold' with 'It sucks.' So there s...
I got an A on the third quiz in American history, an A, dammit. Last time I got a B up from a C and my father said, "if you can get a C you can get a B, if you can get a B you can get an A."- I got an A and my father said, "grades don't mean anything...
I'm as vulnerable as anybody to the toxicity of the American nuclear family. But I wouldn't call it disease or moral failure as much as I would point the finger at a system that grinds people down like a metal file. Who doesn't need a drink? Who isn'...
In 1971, after seven years in college, with that magic piece of paper clutched triumphantly in my fist, the best job I was able to get was night watchman on a sewer project in Babylon, N.Y. guarding a hole in the ground to prevent anyone from stealin...
Americans made beautiful, principled speeches and imposed countless conditions on all manner of things. But in the end, in Africa they seemed to move the ball very slowly. They regarded Africa not as a terrain of opportunity, or even as a morally com...
The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation wi...
I love the 'Housewives.' I don't watch 'American Idol' or 'X Factor.' I guess I don't like network reality: I like my Bravo; I like documentary programming - I love 'Intervention' and some things on TLC more than others - but the 'Real Housewives' to...
They are the largest collection of freshwater lakes in the world. They border eight U.S. states and the Canadian Providence of Ontario and at time have supplied water to one-third of Canadians and one-seventh of Americans. They're vaster than the ent...
American soldiers were dying in frigid Korea. One of our greatest generals told us that the president and his team were not trying to win. And some strident voices were saying that that was because they didn't want to win,
The split in America, rather than simply economic, is between those who embrace reason, who function in the real world of cause and effect, and those who, numbed by isolation and despair, now seek meaning in a mythical world of intuition, a world tha...
So, yeah, my people figured that maybe there's something at the back of it all, a creator, a great spirit, and so we say thank you to it, because it's always good to say thank you. But we never built churches. We didn't need to. The land was the chur...
One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The m...
The best thing—in Shadow's opinion, perhaps the only good thing—about being in prison was a feeling of relief. The feeling that he'd plunged as low as he could plunge and he'd hit bottom. He didn't worry that the man was going to get him, because...
He sat down on a grassy bank and looked at the city that surrounded him, and thought, one day he would have to go home. And one day he would have to make a home to go back to. He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a whil...
Fuck you," said Czernobog. "Fuck you and fuck your mother and fuck the fucking horse you fucking rode in on. You will not even die in battle. No warrior will taste your blood. No one alive will take your life. You will die a soft, poor death. You wil...
The shape does not change. There was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. you may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are lik...
Soon, challenges against the Post's ownership of two television stations in Florida were filed with the Federal Communications Commission. The price of Post stock on the American Exchange dropped by almost 50 percent. Among the challengers - forming ...
If you want to know my story, you have to go back to the beginning. Not the beginning-beginning, but about nine months later. You see, I was born as a poor farm boy. Believe it or not, my parents were so poor that they didn’t even own a farm. Nope....
But my gloom did not lessen. I knew that I'd had a bad dream, and I stood in the dark trying to recollect it. The second I closed my eyes, I was with the dead. They did things words cannot express. They spoke madness. ("Hanka")
It's a rotten world, Miss Millick,' said Mr. Wran, talking at the window. 'Fit for another morbid growth of superstition. It's time the ghosts, or whatever you call them, took over and began a rule of fear, They'd be no worse than men.' ("Smoke Ghost...
Dear Natalie, In a recent study conducted by jarodkintz.com, nine out of ten people were more likely to say yes when the salesperson wore pants. The curious thing is that the prospective customers were being sold a foreskin, and only one out of ten p...