For a moment he wondered, again, if he should just give it all up. Perhaps he should go back to Italy, back to his hiding place. What made him think that he could rejoin the world of daylight? But he was tired of living in shadows. He was tired of th...
The schoolroom clock was worn raw by stares; and you couldn't look up at the big Puritanical face of it and not feel the countless years of young eyes reflected in it, urging it onwards. It was a dark, old spirit that didn't so much mark time as bequ...
…Finally, although Tennent’s Super Strong lager, White Lightning, and for the rare rich alcoholic Stella Artois are perfectly acceptable drinks, could you please come up with something less damaging? I think lighter fuel is better for you and con...
But thoughtless ingratitude is the armour of the young; without it, how would they ever get through life? The old wish the young well, but they wish them ill also: they would like to eat them up, and absorb their vitality, and remain immortal themsel...
Fifteen-year-old girls produce children with sixteen-year-old boys in the backseat of cars and in the stairwells of apartment buildings. Why can't two loving adults who have contemplated parenthood and are prepared to offer love, patience, and devoti...
A brick could be used as a doorstop. But that’s obvious. What isn’t obvious is why somebody would want to stop a door, since doors represent openness. What is that person hiding behind that door that they want to stop people from opening it up? I...
An idea is just another idea if you don't roll up your sleeves and make it happen. A dream is just another dream if you don't bring it to life. You must always Stay The Course...no matter what happens in your life, to live the life you want!
I first became aware of death when my father held me up to see the view from the top of the Empire State Building. I thought that if he moved me just one foot over, I would die. But I trusted him to hold me tight. I wouldn’t fall over, and he would...
As I was looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, it occurred to me that if all else failed, a man could at least kiss himself, and I stared in to the mirror, conjuring up the memory of the couple in the film. I couldn't get the image of their lips ...
Anyone who knew Violet well could tell she was thinking hard, because her long hair was tied up in a ribbon to keep it out of her eyes. Violet had a real knack for inventing and building strange devices, so her brain was often filled with images of p...
If you could imagine the color of anger, it had been splashed over every wall. Rage, something dense and seething, was hanging from every chandelier, resentment woven into thick carpets padding the room, hatred flickering underneath every lampshade. ...
Fear is the original sin,” suddenly said a still, small voice away back—back—back of Valancy’s consciousness. “Almost all the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that some one is afraid of something.” Valancy stood up. She was st...
I heard the car door shut and then Fabian's voice. "You won't believe what I found around the edge of your property," the ghost announced. "A cave with prehistoric painting inside it!" I rolled my eyes. That was the best tactic Fabian could come up w...
All right," Mom said. She gave Samuel a stern look,"Now I don't know what's going on between you and my daughter and Adam Hauptman-" "Neither do we," I muttered Samuel grinned "We have it pretty well worked out as far as the sex goes. Adam gets it-so...
The sunrise was the colour of bad blood. It leaked out of the east and stained the dark sky red, marked the scraps of the cloud with stolen gold. Underneath it the road twisted up the mountainside towards the fortress of Fontezarmo - a cluster of sha...
One o’ clock. With her fork she would tantalize the heart of an adoring artichoke, while her escort served himself up in the thick, dripping sentences of an enraptured man. Four o’clock: her little feet moving to melody, her face distinct in the ...
public display and operatic suffering—an in-your-face owning of one’s vulnerability and fucked-upness to the point of embarrassing and offending tight-asses is a powerful feminist strategy. Writing is tough work, I don’t see how anyone can real...
There, Master Niketas,’ Baudolino said, ‘when I was not prey to the temptations of this world, I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds. A bit with the help of wine, and a bit with that of the green honey. There is nothing better than imagin...
My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, b...
What a storyteller does is *see* more than most of us. We say he's making up his stories, but he—or better yet, *she*—watches more carefully, and then tells us what we would have seen ourselves if we'd just stopped to look." -Leah said—to Nadin...
In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it ...
