My heart filled with Nick's smile, with the look of sheer adoration he gave me as he lugged the bucket. In the space of an instant, I felt it again—the crumbling of an old part of me, the growth of something new. The changing of my heart into a mot...
Later, when she sees the photographs for the first time, she will be surprised at how calm her face looks - how steady her gaze, how erect her posture. In the picture her eyes will be slightly closed, and there will be a shadow on her neck. The shawl...
She bewitches you," Trevanion said. "And she is yours for the taking. Any fool can see that. So take her and whatever needs to be out of your system." ... "Maybe you are right, Trevanion," he said, turning back to his father. "But it is her hope that...
Fire's tears were real now, and there was no helping them, for there was no time. Everything was moving too fast. She crossed the room to him, put her arms around him, clung to him, turning her face to the side, learning all at once that it was awkwa...
There is no moment that exceeds in beauty that moment when one looks at a woman and finds that she is looking at you in the same way that you are looking at her. The moment in which she bestows that look that says, "Proceed with your evil plan, sumbi...
Back then he'd hammered out rags as rough as the planks that made up that schoolhouse stage. Over the years he's taken a saw and rasp to those tunes and smoothed them at the edges, sanded them slowly over time with finer and finer grit paper, and app...
Science fiction is held in low regard as a branch of literature, and perhaps it deserves this critical contempt. But if we view it as a kind of sociology of the future, rather than as literature, science fiction has immense value as a mind-stretching...
Roosevelt spoke eloquently, in his penetrating tenor, of those 'who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life . . . I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-no...
Fantastic literature has been especially prominent in times of unrest, when the older values have been overthrown to make way for the new; it has often accompanied or predicted change, and served to shake up rational Complacency, challenging reason a...
The fantastic postulates that there are forces in the outside world, and in our own natures, which we can neither know nor control, and these forces may even constitute the essence of our existence, beneath the comforting rational surface. The fantas...
Well, this is the hardest part to believe; look, you can suspend me if you want to, but it's the God's honest truth. This man Tompkins came all the way down to where I was bending over the body at the foot of the stairs. I straightened up and covered...
Life is such unutterable hell, solely because it is sometimes beautiful. If we could only be miserable all the time, if there could be no such things as love or beauty or faith or hope, if I could be absolutely certain that my love would never be ret...
Most of the big shore places were closed now. And there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of the ferryboat across the sound. And as the moon rose higher, the inessential houses began to melt away till gradually I became aware of ...
What I'm trying to tell you, Griffin King, is that I don't want to live in a world that doesn't have you in it." She drew a deep breath and summoned all her courage. "I love you." Time seemed to stop. He just stared up at her. A swath of her hair fel...
The minister paused in his narrative. At that moment there came a tremendous blast of wind which shook the windows of the manse, and burst open the hall door, and caused the candles to flicker and the fire to go roaring up the chimney. It is not too ...
Your boyfriend and Micah will both be speechless." I unfastened my seatbelt. "That's the third time I've heard 'your boyfriend.' What's going on about that? Why won't anyone say Brayden's name?" Neither of them answered right away. Finally, Jill said...
If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or o...
Clarke, in the deep folds of dream, was conscious that the path from his father’s house had led him into an undiscovered country, and he was wondering at the strangeness of it all, when suddenly, in place of the hum and murmur of the summer, an inf...
[A]dventures befall the unadventurous as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold. Adventures are a logical and reliable result - and have been since at least the time of Odysseus - of the fatal act of leaving one's home, or trying to return to it ...
Whether our caretaker was our mom, dad, uncle, aunt, grandparent, foster parent, or sibling, our blueprint of what a relationship is supposed to look like is drafted by what we observed from our caretaker’s relationship. If our caretaker took their...
The idea that someone could, or would want to, experience uninterrupted happiness over a period of days, let alone years, is ludicrous. Anyone who feels pleasant and bubbly all the time is either mentally disabled or hooked on crack. Money, on the ot...
