Because when I first saw you I thought─no, I knew─you were special. Because I still think that every time I look at you. Because I think you're smart and funny and brave. But most of all," he grins at me─ "because I like questions.
See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it. And the very act of living is a tide: at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much...
There exists indeed an opposition to it [ ] by the friends of William and Mary, which is not strong. The most restive is that of the . In this the Presbyterian clergy take the lead. The tocsin is sounded in all their pulpits, and the first alarm deno...
Fiordland, a vast tract of mountainous terrain that occupies the south-west corner of South Island, New Zealand, is one of the most astounding pieces of land anywhere on God's earth, and one's first impulse, standing on a cliff top surveying it all, ...
Visiting any shop for the first time is exciting. There's always that buzz as you push open the door; that hope; that belief - that this is going to be the shop of all shops, which will bring you everything you ever wanted, at magically low prices.
There was no more meaningless phrase in all of language than "Cheer up!" The only way to get someone to cheer up was to help them forget, and saying "cheer up" had quite the opposite effect, only reminding the person why he or she was depressed in th...
Barrett is a bigger guy, not fat (not yet) but ursine, crimson of eye and lip; ginger-furred, possessed (he likes to think) of an enchanted sensual slyness, the prince transformed into wolf or lion, all slumbering large-pawed docility, awaiting, with...
In the immediate nearness of the gold, all else had been forgotten [...], and I could not doubt that he hoped to seize upon the treasure, find and board the under cover of night, cut every honest throat about that island, and sail away as he had at f...
Is this your boyfriend?" the first nun asked. Clair Olivia looked me up and down. “No. This is my gay friend who decided he was straight and single-handedly wrecked havoc at an all-boys school in Massachusetts this fall. He’s gay again and home f...
I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Like all the drugs put together – the lithium, the Prozac, the desipramine, and Desyrel that I take to sleep at night – can no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the f...
It's funny, but have you ever noticed that the more special something is, the more people seem to take it for granted? It's like they think it won't ever change. Just like this house here. All it ever needed was a little attention, and it would never...
Now I wish she'd never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July.
Mother is her son's first god; she must teach him the most important lesson of all - how to love.
I do not want that our loyalty as Indians should be in the slightest way affected by any competitive loyalty whether that loyalty arises out of our religion, out of our culture or out of our language. I want all people to be Indians first, Indian las...
I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat.
Idrith didn’t want to go back to his cold lonely room, with all its unanswered questions. He took the glass and sat down. For a long while they sat without speaking, watching the flames and sipping their drinks. Idrith would have felt at peace if i...
Of all radio program forms, the radio talk is the hardest to write, to give, and to make interesting and acceptable to the listening public. The first inclination of almost everyone, in turning on the radio and finding someone talking, is to switch t...
In 1980, during my sophomore year at MIT, I realized that the school didn't have a student space organization. I made posters for a group I called Students for the Exploration and Development of Space and put them up all over campus. Thirty-five peop...
Haagen-Dazs (a clever Scandi-sounding name invented by Americans in 1961) was bought for its Euro-sounding sophistication by the kind of Americans who first bought those Mercs and Beemers, while Ben & Jerry's (now owned by Unilever) brought a post-hi...
You know, there's a real irony in U.S. assistance programs. First of all, I think it's misnamed. We're not so much trying to help people as we're trying to help ourselves. So let's be clear about this. So these are - in my view, they're cold calculat...
I don't write a play from beginning to end. I don't write an outline. I write scenes and moments as they occur to me. And I still write on a typewriter. It's not all in ether. It's on pages. I sequence them in a way that tends to make sense. Then I w...
