As she peeked through the curtains with the phone in her hand, waiting for the police dispatcher to pick up, she realized there was one thing she did know about the naked stranger in her yard. He had, without a doubt, the finest butt on the planet.
Good gods, female,” Addolgar muttered. “What did you do with yourself before I came into your life?” “I lived quietly alone in my cave,” she snapped back. “And I was quite happy there, too.
Sometimes you met someone that changed the pattern, who wormed their way past the cracks in your heart, caulked them up, sealed themselves in, and stayed there. Sometimes they did it by insisting you meet them at every step, as Jamie had done to me.
Apparently, the glasses didn’t need to be connected to the internet for the wearer to poke into someone’s personal life. Even though a search engine could lead to an individual’s address, the browser couldn’t actually physically take you ther...
A hedgehog? And just how does a hedgehog make love?" he demanded. No, I thought. I won't. I will not. But I did. "Very carefully," I replied, giggling helplessly. So now we know just how old that one is, I thought.
How could she trust this man, so imprecise with his words, to take care of the burial? To say there had been a loss was ludicrous; one lost a shoe or a pair of keys. You did not suffer the death of a child and say there was a loss. There was a catast...
We did a Tarot card reading. She told me different things, most of them depressing and worth forgetting. But what I'll always remember is her prediction of my death, and how I'd become a kind of ghost, ‘wandering’ she said, with a ‘spiritual re...
When we meet God in the gospel, we first encounter him as a stranger, come to rescue us from a danger we did not even realize we were in.
Ravens are the birds I'll miss most when I die. If only the darkness into which we must look were composed of the black light of their limber intelligence. If only we did not have to die at all. Instead, become ravens.
I learned very quickly that when you emigrate, you lose the crutches that have been your support; you must begin from zero, because the past is erased with a single stroke and no one cares where you’re from or what you did before.
And you thought: they're used to it. But that was how those who suffered less always thought about those who suffered more, that they were used to it, that they no longer felt it as you did. Nobody ever got used to it. All they learned to do was to s...
I hate the very noise of troublous man Who did and does me all the harm he can. Free from the world I would a prisoner be And my own shadow all my company
I never noticed that the very strength and facility of the pessimists' case at once poses us a problem. If the universe is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator...
Now Doon seemed to care for his new friends more than he did for her. Every time she thought about him she felt a thud of pain, like a bruised place inside her.
Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population...
All in all, the lunch date was fine. Like an opened can of soda in its second hour. If you were thirsty, you might take a sip or two, but I carried more hopes walking in to the restaurant than I did walking out.
He looked down at me without recognition, and I realized with a little stab of anxiety that he must have forgotten all about me, perhaps for some considerable time, and that he himself was so lost in the labyrinth of his own unquiet thoughts that I d...
There was a pleasant party of barge people round the fire. You might not have thought it pleasant, but they did; for they were all friends or acquaintances, and they liked the same sort of things, and talked the same sort of talk. This is the real se...
She stared at him dully and said: “I don’t like crooks, and even if I did, I wouldn’t like crooks that are stool-pigeons, and if I liked crooks that are stool-pigeons, I still wouldn’t like you.” She turned to the outer door.
She grinned, looking for all the world like a sticky-mouthed little girl who had just convinced her gullible mother that she really did drop the first piece of candy into the storm drain and would need another.
Did you think I'd only want you once? Oh, my, you are more naïve than I thought. Why would I go through so much trouble for a mere tryst? Does a man ride a stallion but one time before condemning it to the abattoir?