You describe your Wonderful Night very well. That is, you describe the place & the people and the night and the feeling of it all, very well—but not the itself—the setting but not the jewel. And no wonder! Wordsworth often does just the same. His...
I missed the sound of her shuffling her homework while I listened to music on her bed. I missed the cold of her feet against my legs when she climbed into bed. I missed the shape of her shadow where it fell across the page of my book. I missed the sm...
And Mrs. Treaclebunny has promised to speak English from now on as well. In fact, she said when she goes to England, that's all she speaks anyway because the animals speak English there. She says anyone who has read children's books with animals in t...
«“I meant, tell me all about this steampunk thing!” Gavin broke in. “How does that concept work out for you people, here in Brazil?” “You don’t know about steampunk?” shouted Xavier, dubiously. “Well, I don’t read many novels! Beca...
I felt him there with me. The real David. My David. David, you are still here. Alive. Alive in me. Alive in the galaxy. Alive in the stars. Alive in the sky. Alive in the sea. Alive in the palm trees. Alive in feathers. Alive in birds. Alive in the m...
Brannagh Maloney had lived with disappearances all her life. They were as familiar to her as the changing of the Fundy tides. People who disappeared left cast-off shadows of themselves, murky tremblings that slunk out of corners on drizzly autumn aft...
So -- I confess I have been a rake at reading. I have read those things which I ought not to have read, and I have not read those things which I ought to have read, and there is no health in me -- if by health you mean an inclusive and coherent knowl...
He put the book down. “As you wish.” He rose and walked past me. I lowered my sword, expecting him to pass, but suddenly he stepped in dangerously close. “Welcome home. I’m glad you made it. There is coffee in the kitchen for you.” My mouth...
Richard put away the Narnia books, convinced, sadly, that they were an allegory; that an author (whom he had trusted) had been attempting to slip something past him. He had had the same disgust with the Professor Challenger stories, when the bull-nec...
There was a time in the ancient world - a very long time - in which the central cultural problem must have seemed an inexhaustible outpouring of books. Where to put them all? How to organize them on the groaning shelves? How to hold the profusion of ...
When it repudiates a past paradigm, a scientific community simultaneously renounces, as a fit subject for professional scrutiny, most of the books and articles in which that paradigm had been embodied. Scientific education makes use of no equivalent ...
Sunny put on eyebrows, eyelashes, makeup, matching pajamas, a silk robe, and then say looking at herself in the vanity mirror in her bathroom. She had experienced moments in her life when she realized that she was actually alive and living in the wor...
You pull a book from the shelf and there was an invention... Almost like cooking, I thought sleepily. Instead of heat transforming the ingredients, there's pure invention, the spark, the hidden element. What resulted was more than the sum of parts......
There are so many charlatans in the world of education. They teach for a couple of years, come up with a few clever slogans, build their websites, and hit the lecture circuit. In this fast-food-society, simple solutions to complex problems are embrac...
I love the word 'fashion.' That's why I'm using it in the title of this book. Fashion is about change and about creating clothes within a historical context. To me, dismissing fashion as silly or unimportant seems like a denial of history and frequen...
Murphy caught that arm and continued the motion, using her own body as a fulcrum in a classic hip throw - except that Binder was facing in the opposite direction than usual for that technique. You could hear his arm come out of its socket fifty feet ...
Everyday, you get home from the shops with a bag of cat food and bin-liners and realise that, yet again, you failed to have cosmetic surgery, book a cheap weekend in Paris, change your name to something more glamorous, but the fifth series of The Sop...
And we've read scary books and watched scary movies and TV shows together. He's met monsters, ghouls, and demons on the page and on the screen. There's nothing like watching Anaconda with your best friend or lying in bed next to your mother reading R...
I loved him. I couldn't pinpoint what made me so certain, but I knew it then, as surely as I knew my name or the color of the sky or any fact written in a book. Could he feel it, too? Maxon broke the kiss and looked at me. "You're so pretty when you ...
Daydreaming does not enjoy tremendous prestige in our culture, which tends to regard it as unproductive thought. Writers perhaps appreciate its importance better than most, since a fair amount of what they call work consists of little more than daydr...
It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale. So many things have been shown s...
