You said to your mind, "I want everyone to like me. I don't want anyone to speak badly of me. I want everything I say and do to be acceptable and pleasing to everyone. I don't want anyone to hurt me. I don't want anything to happen that I don't like....
Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other.We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that musty old cheese that we are. We have had to agree...
I am back in my beloved city. The scene of desolation fills my eyes with tears. At every step my distress and agitation increases. I cannot recognize houses or landmarks I once knew well. Of the former inhabitants, there is no trace. Everywhere there...
I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from ...
Despite the real danger of malaria, a wide swath of people of every age and education level and nationality all around the world imagine mosquito nets to be ‘confining' and 'suffocating;’ most others refuse to use them because they ‘don’t loo...
You told me, if something is not used it is meaningless, and took my temperature, which I had thought to save for a more difficult day. In the mirror, every night, the same face, a bit more threadbare, a dress worn too long. The moon was out in the c...
His mouth opened, nudging her lips apart, and she let him in. He tangled his tongue with hers and made it impossible for her to breathe without him. The kiss took turns at tender, hot, relentless. She loved them all. She could kiss him all night, the...
Guyal of Sfere had been born one apart from his fellows and early proved a source of vexation for his sire. Normal in outward configuration, there existed within his mind a void that ached for nourishment. It was as if a spell had been cast upon his ...
I didn’t want to fall in love. Looking at you gave me chills and kissing you made my knees weak. You made flowers grow and fill the space in my lungs which made it impossible for me to breathe. I’m trying to drench the memories and the blood that...
Johnny Foote: Listen, Celia finally told me about the babies. All of them. But I also know that the minute you started working here, she started getting better. You saved her life. Minny Jackson: You mean, you knew I'd been working here this whole ti...
Big Joe: According to this map, we got a river to cross before we get into this town of yours. Kelly: Yeah, well there's a bridge right here, six miles out. Big Joe: There was a bridge. The Air Corps knocked every bridge out of that river months ago....
[Clayton Townley is addressing a large audience at a night-time pro-white rally] Clayton Townley: I love Mississippi. Audience: YAY! Clayton Townley: THEY! They hate Mississippi! They hate us because we present a shining example of *successful* segre...
Professor Henry Higgins: All right, Eliza, say it again. Eliza Doolittle: The rine in spine sties minely in the pline. Professor Henry Higgins: [sighs] The *rain* in *Spain* stays *mainly* in the *plain*. Eliza Doolittle: Didn't ah sy that? Professor...
Lady Catherine de Bourg: Now tell me once and for all: Are you engaged to him? Elizabeth Bennet: I am not. Lady Catherine de Bourg: And will you promise never to enter into such an engagement? Elizabeth Bennet: I will not and I certainly never shall....
Woody: Wait a minute, you turned on the TV last night, not Jessie. Stinky Pete the Prospector: We have an eternity to spend at the museum together. Let's not put it in a fight. Woody: You really ARE Stinky Pete, aren't you? Jessie: Prospector, this i...
Seth Abrahams: [high on coke] We act like we have all the answers and we're totally invincible, like our parents seem and their parents before them, and I'm sorry, that I have to be the one to say this, but it's fucking bullshit. For instance I know ...
He bent to put his cheek against hers. His breath against her ear made her shudder with each deliberately spoken word. "I have wanted to do this," he said, "every moment of every hour of every day that I have been with you since the day I met you.
Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy — that is a hermit's judgment: "There is something arbitrary in his stopping to look back and look around, in his not digging deeper but laying his spade aside; there is also something suspicious about it...
When I was younger, I felt it essential to see every movie ever made. Now I feel as though I've got to read every book, see every art show, watch every play and opera and concert and so on. It does not end, and of course there is truth in the old cli...
Divinity for the sake of the simple-minded is beautiful. Those theological assertions you write, say, or live by that you later feel foolish about, it means God still lives in you enough to tell you that they were indeed foolish. By mistakes you know...
Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and stre...
