the English explorer Richard Burton told the story of an Englishman finding his new wife unconscious on the marital bed, having chloroformed herself. She had pinned a note to her nightdress which read: 'Mama says you're to do what you like.
The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled...
Look, I don't know who has been telling you over the years that you aren't worthy of love and happiness, but they're idiots. We all deserve it. And if people get hurt along the way, that's life. We've all been hurt. Doesn't that make love more crucia...
My English teacher has no face. She has uncombed stringy hair that droops on her shoulders. The hair is black from her part to her ears and then neon orange to the frizzy ends. I can't decide if she had pissed off her hairdresser or is morphing into ...
Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will ou...
Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't realized was gone. Wi...
Oh! do look at Miss Oriel's bonnet the next time you see her. I cannot understand why it should be so, but I am sure of this—no English fingers could put together such a bonnet as that; and I am nearly sure that no French fingers could do it in Eng...
Having spent all of my decision-making years as a Pagan of one stripe or another, I have long found it condescending at best to assume one cannot worship the old gods or believe in magick without breaking out the leather bracers, wings, or Ye Broken ...
The English judged a person so that they'd be justified in casting her out. The Amish judged a person so that they'd be justified in welcoming her back. Where I'm from, if someone is accused of sinning, it's not so that others can place blame. It's s...
I know a man who used to be a millionaire before 2007. Now he’s poor and mopping floors. But I’m not laughing, because at least he was able to get a job. Unlike me, who only has an English degree that’s not even worth the paper it’s printed o...
Bloody Americans. Why did they have to DATE? Why couldn't they just spend their time ignoring each other, like the English? If he'd stayed in London he would never have met anyone. he'd be alone and unhappy, like me, but at least he wouldn't be DATIN...
The problem is that most people spend their lives looking but not truly seeing, or, as Sherlock Holmes, the meticulous English detective, declared to his partner, Dr. Watson, “You see, but you do not observe.
There is a funny story I always tell my students...when I came for the first time to the US. I didn’t speak English (Only Spanish) & I saw on every door the word “exit” which in Spanish means Success = Exito. And then I said :”No wonder Ameri...
I'm born and raised in Mexico. I only spent eight months in the States, but definitely English is a really big part of my life, and I love it. Thank God my mom put me in American school because I'm able to be working in the States, and it opens a lot...
Why should Scotland be stopped from suggesting to the English people that we join a new union under new terms? Let's not try to dominate one another. Let's be a collection, like being in the pub with a kitty. When we vote in Scotland, we vote one way...
Species do not grow more perfect: the weaker dominate the strong again and again - the reason being they are the great majority, and they are also cleverer.... Darwin forgot the mind (- that in English): the weak possess more mind. ... To acquire min...
Write. Don't talk about writing. Don't tell me about your wonderful story ideas. Don't give me a bunch of 'somedays'. Plant your ass and scribble, type, keyboard. If you have any talent at all it will leak out despite your failure to pay attention in...
…so many ticks steadily around the clock. My heart beats ferociously, as if to say it will not digest this leaving. But you are gone. I could never look into your tormenting eyes again. You mock me with each word you choose…. of the millions of w...
His head snapped sharply aside to collide with his own aching shoulder. The hulking brute he had heard referred to as Abdullah leaned into Caine’s face while his brain was yet reeling, flexing his fingers from the punch just dealt to his jaw, and s...
There was something ghost-like and insubstantial about gases to these early chemists. They called liquids that turned into gases easily, "spirits." Methyl alcohol, they called "wood spirit"; ethyl alcohol, "wine spirit." Even today, alcoholic beverag...
My mother tongue, Mende, is very expressive, very figurative, and when I write, I always struggle to find the English equivalent of things that I really want to say in Mende. For example, in Mende, you wouldn't say 'night came suddenly'; you would sa...
