Courtesy is a silver lining around the dark clouds of civilization; it is the best part of refinement and in many ways, an art of heroic beauty in the vast gallery of man's cruelty and baseness.
He was your usual man when it came to romance, which is to say he couldn’t recite Baa Baa Black Sheep when sober, whereas when drunk, sixteen cantos of Byron’s Don Juan was par for the course.
Our brains are obviously capable of astoundingly fast and complex calculations that happen subconsciously. We can't explain them because most of the time we hardly even realize they're happening.
He tried to soften his mouth against hers, tried to tell her he was sorry, but she stayed frozen in his arms, as if she couldn't believe, after everything that had happened, that he thought he could break her heart and take a kiss too.
It'll turn out you mean love,' Sholto said. 'At the moment math is the only thing that excites you so you're nosing around numbers as if numbers are life. But in two years you'll be telling me about some boy.
I'm tired of being set upon by crazed Christians one minute and unbridled libertines the next. Girls, I'm going camping.
Em didn't truly understand about my panic attacks - no one did. But she'd never pushed me to explain, never tried to ditch me when things got weird, and never once looked at me like I was a freak.
In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers.
If {Death} comes for you?” he said. “Would you be so sanguine then?” She laughed and the pensiveness was gone. “No indeed. I will curse the stars and go down fighting. But it will still have been a wonderful thing, to cross the mist.
If it’s not clear enough in the piece, I love it when people things to me they know and I’m interested in but don’t yet know. It’s when they explain things to me I know and they don’t that the conversation goes awry.
I felt afraid. No one would know that, not Mother and not Mike. I’d keep the fear pushed down inside of me, and no one would know it was there. “I’m awfully happy,” I wrote. I was. Awfully happy and awfully in love, and tomorrow I was marryin...
Hard to believe that so nearby, just across the Channel, such atrocities could still occur in their supposedly civilized world, that one could wake up one morning and find oneself bereft of brothers, parents, friends, all with the slice of an ax.
Conroy writes that, while part of him was following the basketball game from the bench, "the other part, an embassy of a completely sovereign nation, would fling its doors open to the most authentic part of me.
I suddenly realise that it doesn't matter how far I go, or how lost I am, or how lonely I feel. I fit in here. I always will. That's how I know I'm home.
Word of advice, sister mine. If you want to keep your papers private, don't write 'Private' on the cover. It set the mater right off. It was all I could do to stop her sniffing around like some great sniffing thing.
In the vast majority of cases, however, getting into trouble has nothing to do with one's self-esteem. It usually has much more to do with whatever is causing the trouble - a monster, a bus driver, a banana peel, killer bees, the school principal - t...
A person without her or his own truth ain't a person at all, Ida said. Anybody who tells you different—is a jackass, and no longer deserves to be called human being.
I had declared in public my desire to be a writer ... I wanted to develop a curiosity that was oceanic and insatiable as well as a desire to learn and use every word in the English language that didn't sound pretentious or ditzy.
History shows that it does not matter who is in power or what revolutionary forces take over the government, those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end tha...
The misery of other people is only an abstraction [...] something that can be sympathized with only by drawing from one's own experiences. But as it stands, true empathy remains impossible. And so long as it is, people will continue to suffer the pre...
...we are all sorry when loss comes for us. The test of our character comes not in how many tears we shed but in how we act after those tears have dried.
