I knew by the signs it would be a hard winter. The hollies bore a heavy crop of berries and birds stripped them bare. Crows quarreled in reaped fields and owls cried in the mountains, mournful as widows. Fur and moss grew thicker than usual. Cold rai...
Still must the poet as of old, In barren attic bleak and cold, Starve, freeze, and fashion verses to Such things as flowers and song and you; Still as of old his being give In Beauty's name, while she may live, Beauty that may not die as long As ther...
Of all human activities, writing is the one for which it is easiest to find excuses not to begin – the desk’s too big, the desk’s too small, there’s too much noise, there’s too much quiet, it’s too hot, too cold, too early, too late. I ha...
She was too quiet, or she was too loud. She took things too seriously, or not seriously at all. She was too sensitive, or too cold-hearted. She hated with every fiber of her being, or loved with all her heart. There was no in-between for her. It was ...
I’m a cold-hearted bastard. I’m insular, I’m jaded, a workaholic, I’m ruthless and I’m self-serving. I don’t do forever, I rarely even do “I’ll call you tomorrow”. And just because I’m here now it does not mean if you ask me to st...
It's hard to say goodbye for good at any time or any place. It's harder still to say it through a meshed wire. It crisscrossed his face into little diagonals, gave me only little broken-up molecules of it at a time. It stenciled a cold, rigid frame a...
Things aren't what they used to be' is the rallying cry of small minds. When men say things used to be better, they invariably mean they were better for them, because they were young, and had all their hopes intact. The world is bound to look a darke...
... In our family, if you said the words 'I feel,' they better be followed with 'hungry' or 'cold'. Because we didn't get personal, that's just how it was.
My parents raised me that you never ask people about their reproductive plans. “You don’t know their situation,” my mom would say. I considered it such an impolite question that for years I didn’t even ask myself. Thirty-five turned into fort...
I'm constantly snatching my books out of the hands of precocious ten-year-olds who are simply too young to read them, despite parents insisting that dear Octavia has a reading age of 28. I remember trying to read 'In Cold Blood' at the age of twelve,...
If I have forfeited the ability to wonder so as not to offend the tenets of the culture, and if I have sacrificed warm dreams on the cold altar of conformity, it is likely because I have somewhere traded the marvel of the infinite for the malaise of ...
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, a...
I listened long to your story, Listened but could not hear. When you chose to walk that path so overgrown, I remained alone with my fear. Cold silence covers the distance, Stretches from shore to shore. I follow in my mind your far-off journeying, Bu...
Placing his suitcase on the seat next to him, he unbuttoned his suit jacket, loosened up his necktie and removed his fedora. He kept his custom eye wear on and made himself comfortable, looking more like a Wall Street accountant than the cold killer ...
I had a dream about you. You were shivering, and I didn’t know if you were cold or frightened. Being the gentleman that I am, I offered you a sweater woven from the wails from a thousand sinners sizzling in hell.
Her cold, dead body was as stiff as a mannequin, but that didn’t stop me from asking her to dance. I was confident that even as a corpse she’d still have more fluidity on the dance floor than the cup of coffee I’d just frozen and stuffed in my ...
It was Christmas Day and Danny the Car Wiper hit the street junksick and broke after seventy-two hours in the precinct jail. It was a clear bright day, but there was warmth in the sun. Danny shivered with an inner cold. He turned up the collar of his...
Day after day he roamed about in the arctic cold, his soul filled full of bitterness and despair. He saw the world of civilization then more plainly than ever he had seen it before; a world in which nothing counted but brutal might, an order devised ...
To the dismay of those that stood by, about the body of Saruman a grey mist gathered, and rising very slowly to a great height like smoke from a fire, as a pale shrouded figure it loomed over the Hill. For a moment it wavered, looking to the West; bu...
I miss you every damn second I’m not with you,” I breathed against her ear, making her shiver in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. “There is no one—not one fucking person—that makes me feel what you do… Remember that, Dallas. Al...
What did he say? He is in love? My brain stops, my heart stops, my blood ceases to flow. My appendages go weak and cold, and there is a suspension of all space and time as the universe comes into perfect alignment.
