I feel like I’m going to die,’ he says. ‘Could we talk for a few minutes before you die?’ ‘Only if you do it quietly.’ ‘I met this girl last night. I need your advice.’ ‘Come back later.’ ‘No. You might be dead.
The one ring road around the airfield is paved, but heavily rutted and potholed. Every few days a street-sweeper makes its way around, polishing the rutted surface with brushes and water.
Oh, no said her mother sadly. You know nothing of the pettiness of women. When brothers agree to split a joint family they sometimes divide lakhs of rupees worth of property in a few minutes. But the tussle of their wives over the pots and pans in th...
Cross.” His head popped up a few shelves over. “What?” “Check out the magic crap.” He shot me a look. “Oh, is that what we’re supposed to be doing? Because I’ve just been drawing hearts and our initials in the dirt.” Sophie + Archer
Songs and smells will bring you back to a moment in time more than anything else. It's amazing how much can be conjured with a few notes of a song or a solitary whiff of a room. A song you didn't even pay attention to at the time, a place that you di...
Today's marriages become toxic, with resentments, after only a few years. It's one thing to say, 'I forgive,' but most lack the enterprise to do the necessary work that follows. It was the day after that proved who had the wisdom of God and who didn'...
Bridget cried for the leavers and the left. For the people, like herself, grimly forsaking what few precious gifts they would ever get. She cried for Bailey, for Tibby, for the resolute clump of cells making headway in her uterus, and for Marly, her ...
I now know for certain that my mind and emotions, my fix on the real and my family's well-being, depend on just a few grams of salt. But treatment's the easy part. Without honesty, without a true family reckoning, that salt's next to worthless.
They each walked with a limp, because the lifelong journey of grief was setting in. My mom looked at my dad and said, “Remind me what we believe. What do we believe?” After a few moments, my dad responded with these words: “The tomb is empty. T...
She had become the demon, only too much, and too fast. I had an incredible urge to knock her on her ass, take her down a few notches. Turning her just got higher on the priority scale. That’s if I didn’t kill her first.
Why, of course, if the reader were smart enough, he could figure the whole thing through after just the first few pages! But in his heart Arthur knew that his readers didn't really want to win. They wanted to test their wits against the author at ful...
I kind of thought actually that Trevor was gone completely mental when he called up here a few weeks ago. Like, why would he not text or email or Facebook? What's with all the reality, I thought. Does he not know he's a million times cooler in virtua...
Maybe I had a "secret identity", but then when you think about it, don't we all? A part of ourselves very few people ever get to see. The part we think of as "me". The part that deals with the big stuff. Makes the real choices. The part everything el...
Haven't you noticed most of your fairy tales take place in the woods?” a man a few feet from me says. He stutters and lets a belch escape him. “That's why we're out here. We were hoping Jimmi would bring enough damsels for us all, though!
Gandhiji was not born in freedom. All his life, except for a few months. lay within the framework of colonial rule. A good part of that life lay buried in prison cells. Yet he was always the free man, while those who held him imprisoned were the unfr...
The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as so...
The library was still giving trouble: a few books in some of the more obscure corners of the stacks retained some autonomy, dating back to an infamous early experiment with flying books, and lately they’d begun to breed. Shocked undergraduates had ...
They took a baseball bat and whacked open his head. Mummy Boy fell to the ground; he finally was dead. Inside of his head were no candy or prizes, just a few stray beetles of various sizes.
Good thoughts and actions can never produce bad results; bad thoughts and actions can never produce good results … We understand this law in the natural world, and work with it; but few understand it in the mental and moral world—although its ope...
This is going to be murder," Fransic whispered to Mr. Trimes. "Pure murder." "I'm glad to see your confidence returning, Mr. Tucket. Just a few minutes ago you were ready to give up. Now you're talking about killing him." "I meant it the other way." ...
There must be a few times in life when you stand at a precipice of a decision. When you know there will forever be a Before and an After...I knew there would be no turning back if I designated this moment as my own Prime Meridian from which everythin...