Of course I began to see Nikki, which was strange because I was staring into Danny's eyes, and Danny is a six-foot-three black man who looks nothing like my ex-wife.
I began to wonder if what we were doing it evangelical circles had more to do with redeeming ourselves to culture than it did with showing Jesus to a hurting world, a world literally filled with outcasts.
I gotta say"—Apollo broke the silence—"these kids did okay." He cleared his throat and began to recite: " —" Um, yes, first class," Hermes interrupted, like he was anxious to avoid Apollo's poetry.
He began to explain to me that vegetation, and especially mature trees, are able to transmit harmony when one rests one’s nerve centers against a tree trunk. For hours he discoursed on the physical, energetic, and spiritual properties of plants.
Like all stories of creators who bring life from the dead, his story began with a struggling butcher, who chased a gray cat, caught it, took off its studded collar, and slit its throat.
We are ending where the savages began. We have found again the lost arts of starving non-combatants, burning hovels, and leading away the vanquished into slavery. Barbarian invasions would be superfluous: we are our own Huns.
{...]I began to feel tears of frustration build up in my eyes, yearning to free themselves from their glandular prisons.
Jo's whimper rose slightly but the scream she yearned for wouldn't materialise. Instead, as she looked at her hand, she began to make a gurgling, gagging noise, more animal than human.
At first I thought my wife and I were made for each other. It was as if we came out of the same factory. I think we were made in the USA, because things quickly began falling apart.
It was the summer just before we both turned twenty. Before life began to chip away at us like a sculptor into marble, reducing us from endless unformed possibility into the women we would ultimately become.
Above the curving arc of the planet, a mammoth explosion plumed crimson and charcoal then erupted in a starburst of crystaline white which for a microsecond shone brighter than a sun. For the briefest moment he allowed himself to entertain the notion...
They travelled for thirteen hours down-hill, whilst the streams broadened and the mountains shrank, and the vegetation changed, and the people ceased being ugly and drinking beer, and began instead to drink wine and to be beautiful.
The smoke detectors began to ring; for they were battery-powered and thus still functioned, just as a record can still be played after the death of every member of the orchestra.
Words made you mighty. Words, stories, books: they could take you anywhere, and they could go out anywhere in the world. Jenny -- Jane -- picked up her pen, and began to write.
Blood began to flow, at first cautiously, as if embarrassed by its appearance; a few thin red lines exploring the gravitational trajectory of its new terrain. Now it flowed faster, steadily staining her pale flesh a horrific red.
You take a 30-year-old. To him, history began the day he was born. He doesn't know how cold it was 70 years ago unless he's told. He doesn't care. He thinks what's happening now is either the best or the worst, whatever it is, ever. Everybody thinks ...
This past year I grew up to know hunger, grief, darkness, fear. I began to understand how lonely you can feel even when all you want is to be alone.
When I started writing, I thought nobody would understand the things that I liked. Then I began getting a lot of letters from people who said they were waiting for me to express what they felt they couldn't, so I kept writing.
I think it's important to remember where I began. I know that when I talk to other writers, say, writers from the South or writers from abroad, it's where they begin as children that is important to them.
Gerald R. Ford was a decent and honorable man. Under his steady hand, the nation began the process of recovering from the terrible trauma of Watergate - the lies, distortions, cover-ups, misuses of federal agencies to exact political revenge, illegal...
There were differences between memories and dreams. He had only dreams of things he had wanted to do, while Lespere had memories of things done and accomplished. And this knowledge began to pull Hollis apart, with a slow, quivering precision.
