I think as you get older you become more of who you always were. You become a more concentrated version of yourself. You really learn who you are, why you're unique, who you've always been [...] There's a winnowing away of nonessentials, sometimes es...
You don’t annoy me.” Carefully he rebuttoned the placket of her shirt. “I thought you did, at first. But now I realize it was more like the feeling you get when your foot’s been asleep. And when you start moving, the blood coming back into it...
In the grand scheme of things, we share a mutual goal, but I'm not a distraction." He couldn't help laughing, probably loudly enough to scare a school of hammerheads. "What?" "Sharona Blaire." He shook his head, keeping his eyes on the smooth ocean s...
These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without...
Well," he said, "I think we've found our way in. We just wait until they're duking it out, but trust me, these Humans First types don't have a lot of staying power or they'd have been at the gym with me before. I doubt Grandma Kent there is going to ...
For a year, Johnny lived the new, brutal truth that he was on his own. But that's the way it was. What had been concrete one day proved sand the next; strength was illusion; faith meant shit. So what? So his once-bright world had devolved to cold, we...
Well, listen a moment, Monsieur Mayor; I have often been severe in my life towards others. It was just. I did right. Now if I were not severe towards myself, all I have justly done would become injustice. Should I spare myself more than others? No. W...
As Amani frantically diced the ingredients for her Pan seared Mahi-Mahi with Mango Salsa, she recalled her first meeting with him during a class he taught on the presentation of food and organization the previous year. Amani had been immediately draw...
exemplar, n. It's always something we have to negotiate- the face that my parents are happy, and yours have never been. I have something to live up to, and if I fail, I still have a family to welcome me home. You have a storyline to rewrite, and a la...
One day an intrepid sole will climb this mountain on its east side, reaching the summit and the passage that exist between the main peak and secondary peaks, by which he can descend to the west side of the mountain. It is at this site near Lake Brunn...
The fact that in the twentieth century a greater proportion of the people in the world could communicate with one another, using English or just a few other languages, appears not to have stopped any wars, nor to have reduced the frequency with which...
Amd I am not blind to the fact that I have been given gifts you never had. Living a godly life was expected on me, and it was an easy path for me to follow. No one ever had such expectations of you. For you to embrace the Lord at this point in your l...
Do you know who W.H. Auden was, Mr. Iscariot? W.H. Auden was a poet who once said, “God may reduce you on Judgement Day to tears of shame reciting by heart the poems you would have written had your life been good”…She was my poem, Mr. Iscariot....
Speaking the words he had been taught, directing them no longer upward but to the earth on which he knelt, he prayed: 'For what we are about to receive make us truly thankful.' ... he... felt his heart suddenly flow over with thankfulness... like a g...
He was not my boyfriend. On the other hand, he wasn't just a friend either. Instead, our relationship was elastic, stretching between those two extremes depending on who else was around, how much either of us had to drink, and other varying factors. ...
Something’s up,’ I say, handing the phone back. ‘Not necessarily,’ Jack says. ‘You think this is the first time Lila’s been hot-headed? Seriously, dude, you do remember my sister, right? Short, blonde, impulsive as shock therapy? Stubborn...
As Qhuinn looked at his best friend's handsome face, he felt as if he'd never not known that red hair, those blue eyes, those lips, that jaw. And it was because of their long history that he searched for something to say, something that would get the...
From this, one can make a deduction which is quite certainly the ultimate truth of jigsaw puzzles: despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzlemaker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, ...
[N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don't care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a s...
Hermes's shoulders sagged. "They'll try, Percy. Oh, we'll all try to keep our promise. And maybe for a while things will get better. But we gods have never been good at keeping oaths. You were born because of a broken promise, eh? Eventually we'll be...
Let me tell you something, honey. When your boobs fall south and that pretty skin of yours looks like you’ve been tanning in a nuclear war zone, you’ll see what I mean about independence. When the looks are gone, all you’ve got left is your spi...
