As I sat down, though, I realized that you can get used to certain luxuries that you start to think they're necessities, but when you have to forgo them, you come to see that you don't need them after all. There was a big difference between needing t...
Actually, I came because I have a last-minute invitation. My friend Erika Gill is having a big party tomorrow night, one of those all-out birthday bashes that girls like. Want to go?" ---------------------------------------- "No. Sorry." "Since it's ...
You'd think family would be the one sure thing in life, the gimme? Points you got just for being born? So much thick, meaty stuff bound you to these people, so many interlocking spirals of history, genetics, common cause, and struggle that it should ...
I was still excited. Big or small, elephants are elephants, after all. Just before we mounted, when I was sure no one could see me, I quickly kissed the shoulder of my beast and murmured, 'Hey, sweetie.' 'Hey, darlin'." That was Tonio, appearing sudd...
songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality. Some different republic, some liberated republic... whatever the case, it wasn't that I was anti-popular cul...
The Americans were constantly hectoring Africans about their behavior and values—protecting oneself against AIDS, limited family size, sleeping under mosquito nets. Chinese messages… focused on big, tangible things that fairly shouted: This stadi...
What about you, little girl? You going to be a Shadowhunter like your dad?" Clary tried to hide her annoyance. "No," she said. "I'm going to be a Shadowhunter, but I'm not going to be like my father. And my name's Clarissa, but you can call me Clary....
He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights. 'White to play and mate in two moves.' Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy...
Matter,” Vittoria repeated. “Blossoming out of nothing. An incredible display of subatomic fireworks. A miniature universe springing to life. He proved not only that matter can be created from nothing, but that the Big Bang and Genesis can be exp...
Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. We kill peop...
I’m positive I wouldn’t consider having sex with Guy if I hadn’t already had sex beforehand. I always knew I wanted my first time to be with someone I loved and who loved me, which it was . . . but shouldn’t I want that for every time? I disa...
Out of the corner of one eye, I could see my mother. Out of the corner of the other eye, I could see her shadow on the wall, cast there by the lamplight. It was a big and solid shadow, and it looked so much like my mother that I became frightened. Fo...
The end occurred mostly in her whispers and his silence - because he couldn't whisper and they didn't want to wake Colin's parents. They succeeded in staying quiet, in part because it felt like the air had been shocked out of him. Paradoxically, he f...
[I]t seemed to me now that a Catholic church was the right companion for all these horrors. Didn't Catholicism deal with blood and resurrected flesh on a daily basis? Wasn't it expert in superstition? I somehow doubted that the hospitable plain Prote...
I'm not big on regret - until time travel actually exists, it seems like a waste of making yourself feel bad
Oh, dear child. You've got a lot to learn about marriage. Any food can choose the boy who send her heart into a flurry. But there's a big deep divide between desire and devotion. You better not choose the boy who makes you dizzy. No ma'am. You have t...
Looking back, I wish that everyone could have that sort of moment: a moment where you realize that your hands are so impossibly small and this world is so impossibly big. And the two don’t seem to add up. Maybe recognizing the smallness of your own...
I had a dream about you. You were a lone candle on a barren vanilla cake, and I was the mighty breath sent to extinguish your light. I felt like God’s wrath coming down to destroy the Illuminati, while you probably thought I was the Satan coming to...
Sure, some people are afraid of steroids. Some people were afraid of fire, too. Afraid of electricity, or of splitting the atom. But I know that the body I have now is far superior to the one I was born with. I, Jose Canseco, have changed my own dest...
In serving as a pastor for over thirty years, I have seen some remarkable transformations and I’ve seen some big disappointments. I have two observations. First, where there has been lasting change, the common factor, in every case, is that the Wor...
We can deeply love our poison. We can love the taste of it, the scent of it, the comforting weight of it in our belly and find ourselves woken in the night with stabbing cramps, arms around porcelain toilet bowls, hurling every last bit until collaps...
