If it had been a heart attack, the newspaper might have used the word , as if a mountain range had opened inside her, but instead it used the word , a light coming on in an empty room. The telephone fell from my shoulder, a black parrot repeating a s...
At home, my father ate all the most burnt pieces of toast. 'Yum!' he'd say, and 'Charcoal! Good for you!' and 'Burnt toast! My favorite!' and he'd eat it all up. When I was much older he confessed to me that he had not ever liked burnt toast, had onl...
Cats don’t have names,” it said. “No?” said Coraline. “No,” said the cat. “Now, you people have names. That’s because you don’t know who you are. We know who we are, so we don’t need names.” There was something irritatingly self...
Style has a profound meaning to Black Americans. If we can’t drive, we will invent walks and the world will envy the dexterity of our feet. If we can’t have ham, we will boil chitterlings; if we are given rotten peaches, we will make cobblers; if...
My gift to you, Yukiko-chan.' He nodded. 'Use it to cut away your fear, and leave nothing in its wake. Cherish it. And cherish this truth I speak to you now, if no other before or after: The greatest tempest Shima has even known waits in the wings fo...
Then, somehow, I got caught up in one of Kevin's World War II books - a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germa...
In ancient times, people weren't just male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female, female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really g...
In ancient times people weren't just male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female, or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really...
I've always been super aware that we could all die at any moment. This ceiling could fall. I could trip and land on this pen I'm holding. I could choke on my cold pasta lunch. I could be attacked by that pigeon eying me from my window sill. I could b...
...I found myself surrounded by people--starting with my mom, grandparents, uncles, and aunts, and leading to a string of wonderful role models and mentors--who kept pushing me to see more than what was directly in front of me, to see the boundless p...
Oh, the places you'll go! There is fun to be done! There are points to be scored. There are games to be won. And the magical things you can do with that ball will make you the winning-est winner of all. Fame! You'll be as famous as famous can be, wit...
War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to “a war against” whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness ...
FRANCESCA You came in out of the night And there were flowers in your hands, Now you will come out of a confusion of people, Out of a turmoil of speech about you. I who have seen you amid the primal things Was angry when they spoke your name In ordin...
As Hamlet said to Ophelia, ”God has given you one face, and you make yourself another." The battle between these two halves of identity...Who we are and who we prebend to be, is unwinnable. "Just as there are two sides to every story, there are two...
Freedom is essentially a condition of inequality, not equality. It recognizes as a fact of nature the structural differences inherent in man — in temperament, character, and capacity — and it respects those differences. We are not alike and no la...
Kalganov ran back into the front hall, sat down in a corner, bent his head, covered his face with his hands, and began to cry. He sat like that and cried for a long time--cried as though he were still a little boy and not a man of twenty... 'What ...
There is nothing in the world which an artist cannot recreate into something poetic, ennobling. And why do we read these things? They are not facts, they do not improve our business skills, our techniques in manufacturing goods, the management of a h...
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off...
I have, for my own projected works and ideas, only the silliest and dewiest of hopes; no matter what, I am romantic enough or sentimental enough to wish to contribute something to life’s fabric, to the world’s beauty.... [S]imply to live does not...
Lucy could see that love unconfined, love outside convention, might well make a woman an unfit mother; you were one kind of woman or another: you were good or you were bad, as the world saw it, and no stations in between. They allowed you to choose; ...
What if all those strange and unexplainable bends in history were the result of supernatural interference? At which point I asked myself, what's the weirdest most eccentric historical phenomenon of them all? Answer:the Great British Empire. Clearly, ...
