Dear Rocky, Here I am taking my pencil in my hand to say hello, hoping you are in the best of health, both physically and mentally. As for me, I am fine thanks to Almighty God. The weather in the valley is in the shits. It's been raining since Thanks...
Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair. Literature is as old as speech. It grew ...
December 29, 1946: Snowing this morning. The year seems to be dying in a light white blanket. Only three more days of this year, then comes a new one. Then, what? No one knows. -- Diary of Bertha Kate Gaddis who passed away 6 months later, age 78, We...
When the cold comes to New England it arrives in sheets of sleet and ice. In December, the wind wraps itself around bare trees and twists in between husbands and wives asleep in their beds. It shakes the shingles from the roofs and sifts through crac...
When Alex left for Alaska," Franz remembers, "I prayed. I asked God to keep his finger on the shoulder of that one; I told him that boy was special. But he let Alex die. So on December 26, when I learned what happened, I renounced the Lord. I withdre...
One of the dumbest things you were ever taught was to write what you know. Because what you know is usually dull. Remember when you first wanted to be a writer? Eight or ten years old, reading about thin-lipped heroes flying over mysterious viny jung...
Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create m...
Some readers may have noticed an icy little missive from Noam Chomsky ["Letters," December 3], repudiating the very idea that he and I had disagreed on the "roots" of September 11. I rush to agree. Here is what he told his audience at MIT on October ...
Love is like the wild rose-briar; Friendship like the holly-tree. The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms, But which will bloom most constantly? The wild rose-briar is sweet in spring ,Its summer blossoms scent the air; Yet wait till winter come...
Young Deborah: [to Noodles, reading the Torah] "My beloved is white and ruddy. His skin is as the most fine gold. His cheeks are as a bed of spices." Even though he hasn't washed since last December. "His eyes are as the eyes of doves. His body is as...
Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowe...
You have only to stay over Christmas with a family who seriously try to ‘keep’ it (in its third, or commercial, aspect) in order to see that the thing is a nightmare. Long before December 25th everyone is worn out — physically worn out by weeks...
Outside the seasons passed: sun, snow, spring green, October storms . . . was this a vision of my future? When would the shunning hero come, to set the clock if my life in motion again? Would he come some morning, or in the night? In April or Decembe...
O.K., then, all right, they would adopt a white-trash dog. Ha ha. They could name it Zeke, buy it a little corncob pipe and a straw hat. She imagined the puppy, having crapped on the rug, looking up at her, going, Cain’t hep it. But no. Had she com...
I suppose it was a dream that lasted really about fifty years. By the time universal education had begun to work properly, say 1925, and the time the first teachers started to hold back information, say 1975. So a fifty-year dream." "I think what's h...
Not only may you not enter the state without certification: you are, in the eyes of the state, not dead until you are certified dead; and you can be certified dead only by an officer who himself (herself) holds state certification. The state pursues ...
Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one’s living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordin...
I read it twice, then I said, "Well, why don't you?" "Why don't I what?" "Why don't you wish her many happy returns? It doesn't seem much to ask." "But she says on her birthday." "Well, when is her birthday?" "Can't you understand?" said Bobbie. "I'v...
Sefton: [questioning Price] When was Pearl Harbor, Price, or don't you know that? Price: December 7th, '41. Sefton: What time? Price: [smugly] 6:00. I was having dinner. Sefton: [smirks] 6:00 in Berlin. [to the other barrack members] Sefton: They wer...
Jesse James: Well, Charley, did you hurt your leg? Charley Ford: Yeah, I slipped... I slipped off the roof and I smacked down into a snow bank, like a ton of stupidness. One second I'm screamin', "Woah Nelly!", Next second, poof, I'm neck-deep in sno...
A mere wilderness, as you see, even now in December; but in summer a complete nursery of briers, a forest of thistles, a plantation of nettles, without any live stock but goats, that have eaten up all the bark of the trees. Here you see is the pedest...
