Or maybe memories are like karaoke - where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling across the screen's bottom, and with everybody clapping at you, that you didn't even know the lyrics to your all-time favourite song. Only afterwa...
All I know: I could only encounter you, my oasis, coming out of a desert. Deserted myself. This is all right. My futureless and solitary self. When suddenly I hear the voice of the springs--Right away you made me want to sing. To cry. Then to drink. ...
My hopes were all dead --- struck with a subtle doom, such as, in one night, fell on all the first-born in the land of Egypt. I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming and glowing; they lay stark, chill, livid corpses that could never re...
When he came back, I hid my face within my hands. He said: "Fear nothing. Who has seen our kiss? --Who saw us? The night and the moon." "And the stars and the first flush of dawn. The moon has seen its visage in the lake, and told it to the water 'ne...
He was telling her here, in this cellar, as he kissed her feet, he had understood love for the first time - not just from other people's words, but in his heart, in his blood. She was dearer to him than all his past, dearer to him than his mother, th...
I invited a few people to help celebrate your birthday," Cameron said sheepishly. She threw up her hands. "Surprise." "We sort of come with the package," Collin explained. "Think of it as a collective gift from all of us to you: five bona fide annoyi...
Constable N stepped away from the car, into the darkness where Darren could not see where his gun was pointing, and fired two rounds into the air. The gunshots cracked the roof of the night sky and echoed back at us. My first thought was that they co...
What is most troubling, and sad, about industrial eating is how thoroughly it obscures all these relationships and connections. To go from the chicken ( ) to the Chicken McNugget is to leave this world in a journey of forgetting that could hardly be ...
This was the first thing Mark had been asked to do which he himself, before he did it, clearly knew to be criminal. But the moment of his consent almost escaped his notice; certainly, there was no struggle, no sense of turning a corner. There may hav...
Do the things that interest you and do them with all your heart. Don't be concerned about whether people are watching you or criticizing you. The chances are that they aren't paying any attention to you. It's your attention to yourself that is so stu...
I have always regarded as one of the greatest of all Americans. ... It was my good fortune to encounter 's works in my boyhood ... it was, indeed, a revelation to me to read that great thinker's views on political and theological subjects. Paine educ...
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...
The curse that came before history has laid on us all a tendency to be weary of wonders. If we saw the sun for the first time it would be the most fearful and beautiful of meteors. Now that we see it for the hundredth time we call it, in the hideous ...
A giant grin, accompanied by a slight chuckle, had been the grand finale to any of his most successful jokes, while the less impressive resulted in a raise of both his brows, which he followed with a semi-satisfied smirk. The least entertaining attem...
[last lines] Mrs. Marcus: [as she, with Emmeline and Monica in tow, enter the prison hospital, right after Benjy throws the banana peel on the floor] Now see here, you idiots, it's all your fault, because if you hadn't... [slips on the banana peel an...
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...
[first lines] Announcer: In the name of Allah the merciful, all praises due to Allah, Lord of all the worlds. The one God to whom praise is due forever. The one who came to us in the person of Master Fard Muhammad and raised up the Honorable Elijah M...
Although it was only a single instrument, each note had the peculiar echoed quality of a thousand harmonics voiced together. There was a whisper behind the strongest note and a shout beneath the softest, and they sang of far off places in long forgot...
My name," I tell Wilbur in the most dignified voice I can find, "Was inspired by Harriet Quimby, the first female American pilot and the first woman ever to cross the Channel in an aeroplane. My mother chose it to represent freedom and bravery and in...
[In reference to vaginas] Someone saying you're "too loose"? Maybe that person's previous experience has been with women who weren't aroused (which, in the case of young adults, ins't that unusual)...Since many people think that penetration is suppos...
So nobody must be allowed to think at all. Down with the public schools! Children must be drilled mentally by quarter-educated herdsmen, whose wages would stop at the first sign of disagreement with the bosses. For the rest, deafen the whole world wi...
