Reunion with the mother is a siren call haunting our imagination. Once there was bliss, and now there is struggle. Dim memories of life before the traumatic separation of birth may be the source of Arcadian fantasies of a lost golden age.
She'd cried over a broken heart before. She knew what that felt like, and it didn't feel like this. Her heart felt not so much broken as just ... empty. It felt like she was an outline empty in the middle. The outline cried senselessly for the absent...
Bad news doesn't hurt as much, if you hear it in good company. It's like, if somebody pushes you out of a 5th floor window and you bounce off an awning, a car roof, and a pile of plastic garbage bags before you smash onto the pavement, you've got a p...
There was a group of fans who wanted autographs, and several women who managed to write their phone numbers on Wade's hand before he pulled free. Sam sent him an arched brow, but he just shrugged. He got numbers written on him a lot; he'd never figur...
Before it was a Bomb, the Bomb was an Idea. Superman, however, was a Faster, Stronger, Better Idea.
Before that experience, I had often felt the kind of alone that comes from the suspicion that you are not only genetically different from those around you, but different in your very soul...[then] I was a different kind of alone. I was alone and asha...
In the distance, Amanda heard the sirens. Just a little bit longer. She didn't know what was wrong with her, but she was scared of dying before she had the chance to tell Ryker goodbye. In their capable hands, though, surely they could keep her alive...
Leonard asks me if there's anything I need to know before he dies, I think about it for a minute, turn to him, say what's the meaning of life, Leonard? He laughs, says that's an easy one, my son, it's whatever you want it to be.
But man, proud man, Dress'd in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd— His glassy essence—like an angry ape Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven As makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens, Would all thems...
To his surprise, Jean kissed him. So often in the past, teasing, she had said she would, one day. Now she did, and it was a quick and fragrant touch to his lips that gave him courage and, even before he started out made him yearn to come back home.
[Martin Luther King] said that little black boys and little black girls would be able to join hands with little white boys and little white girls as sisters and brothers. Then he reminded both those spectators before him and all Americans that this h...
But there are some things, child, that you steal. That you steal, if you have enough love and courage in your heart. You must snatch freedom from the hands of the tyrant. You must spirit away innocent lives before they are destroyed. You must hide se...
Nothing says I love you like the gift of a half-eaten candy bar. I ate my half two weeks before I remembered to give it to her.
It is only by working the rituals, that any significant degree of understanding can develop. If you wait until you are positive you understand all aspects of the ceremony before beginning to work, you will never begin to work.
Friendship is like putting butter on your socks before you slide them on. Sure, we all do it occasionally, but most of us would rather eat breakfast bare-handed at least once in a while.
He had some taste for romance reading before he went to the university, where, we must confess, in justice to his college, he was cured of the love of reading in all its shapes; and the cure would have been radical, if disappointment in love, and tot...
The anxiety, which in this state of their attachment must be the portion of Henry and Catherine, and of all who loved either, as to its final event, can hardly extend, I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will see in the tell-tale compression of t...
If the deep logic of what determines the value of the fine-structure constant also played a significant role in our understanding of all the physical processes in which the fine-structure constant enters, then we would be stymied. Fortunately, we do ...
However wretched her origins, she chose freely to continue her crimes against us from the moment she woke to this life. It is easy to forgive beautiful women, especially when they lay a sorrowful tale before you like a sugar-dusted meal. It does not ...
Perhaps the relevant truth- and it's one whose existence was apparent to my wife, and I'm sure to much of the world, long before it became apparent to me-is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and unless you're paying attention you'll dis...
But, someone, please give me—who is born again but still so much in need of being born anew—give me the details of how to live in the waiting cocoon before the forever begins?
