Judging Natalie as my mother had judged me was, I felt like telling her son, just my ass-backward way of showing love. I'd spent my life trying to translate that language, and now I realized I had come to speak it fluently. When was it that you reali...
But I was awake, sitting by the window looking down at the trailer and Mr. Zoltan's truck. I could not sleep. That is how it is with folks my age. We take naps during the day, and then we cannot sleep at night. I think that it is because God is getti...
I found this, though," Gazzy said excitedly, holding up a small green box. "Gas-X! Like, 'X' for explosion! This is great! I'm thinking I rig this with a detonator and-" "Did you find that in the medicine cabinet?" Dylan asked. "Yeah." "It's for upse...
You can almost always find chains of coincidence to disprove magic. That's because it doesn't happen the way it does in books. It makes those chains of coincidence. That's what it is. It's like if you snapped your fingers and produced a rose but it w...
You scared the crap out of me,” I shove his bare chest with a growl. “Was that you at the front door?” “Ya think?” He fires back with a raise of his eyebrows, taking hold of my arm again, as he practically drags me back toward the front ent...
I miss the innocence of your childish sweet smile and your gentle, knowing touch. I remember bright and shining, curious eyes and the happy smiles so much. I sometimes think of the noise you made as you playfully chased through the house those days. ...
I don't remember a single monster before I met you.' he'd told Amphibian. 'Now they seem to be all over the place.' 'You mean there wasn't anything you were afraid of?' the Amphibian had asked him. 'lots.' 'What did they look like?' It was a funny qu...
My father told me never to take my foot off a ladder to kick at someone who was kicking at me. When I did that, I would no longer be climbing. While they are kicking, my father told me, I should keep stepping. They can kick only one time. If I contin...
His meals were always punctual. Whether she cooked well or badly he did not know; it was a matter of total indifference to him. During his meals, which he ate at his writing desk, he was busy with important considerations. As a rule he would not have...
In that conversation with Richard, Kris did precisely what she'd done before offering her tennis quitting advice from years before. She paid attention. Instead of getting swept up in a reaction--regardless of how legitimate it would have been--she un...
The Prime Minister gazed hopelessly at the pair of them for a moment, then the words he had fought to suppress all evening burst from him at last. “But for heaven’s sake — you’re ! You can do ! Surely you can sort out — well — !” Scrimg...
I realised with a prickle of discomfort why he bothered me: it was not so much that I resented the hearty backslapping bonhomie of English upper-class gentlemen, for I could tolerate it well enough in Sidney on his own. It was the way Sidney fell so ...
The blade was sharp enough that she didn't feel the initial prick, but it didn't matter. The earth beside her opened up and the knife slid from her attacker's suddenly nerveless hand, thudding to the ground about the same time she did. His grip on he...
We obviously both have our pasts, but that’s not important right now. I don’t have to know every bad thing you ever did in your life to know that you’re a good guy now. People change, grow up, get smarter, move on. In ten years I could be compl...
A child's reaction to this type of calamity is twofold and extreme. Not knowing how deeply, powerfully, life drops anchor into its vast sources of recuperation, he is bound to envisage, at once, the very worst; yet at the same time, because of his in...
what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediat...
I know you're on my side," an immunologist once remarked to me as we discussed the politics of vaccination. I did not agree with him, but only because I was uncomfortable with both sides, as I had seen them delineated. The debate over vaccination ten...
You lived intensely with others, only to have them disappear overnight, since the shadow class was condemned to movement. The men left for other jobs, towns, got deported, returned home, changed names. Sometimes someone came popping around a corner a...
A few years ago the Deists denied the inspiration of the Bible on account of its cruelty. At the same time they worshiped what they were pleased to call the God of Nature. Now we are convinced that Nature is as cruel as the Bible; so that, if the God...
The sun's champagne streamed from one body into another. And there was a couple on the green silk of the grass, covered by a raspberry umbrella. Only their feet and a little bit of lace could be seen. In the magnificent universe beneath the raspberry...
For a good ten minutes or so we stand there with the flashlight burning the grave with light. The whole time, I'm trying to guess where and exactly how he died and, more to the point, realizing that poor old Milla's been without him for sixty-years. ...
