Her eyes travel down to where he's gripping the handle of her suitcase. "What're you doing?" she asks, blinking at him. "You looked like you needed some help." Hadley just stares at him. "And this way it's perfectly legal," he adds with a grin.
He was giving her the most important thing he could, the only way he knew how. He was a professor, a lover of stories, and he was building her a library in the same way other men might build their daughters houses.
Someone once told her there's a formula for how long it takes to get over someone, that it's half as long as the time you've been together. Hadley has her doubts about how accurate this could possibly be, a calculation so simple for something as comp...
Counsels of Bahaudin You want to be filled. But something which is full has first to be emptied. Empty yourself so that you will fill properly, by observing these counsels, which you can do as duties to yourself: First Never follow any impulse to tea...
I’ve spoken to Sid,” she admits. “He says he’s never seen Charlie so bad. He won’t eat, he’s lost weight and he looks terrible. Sid says it’s the first time he’s ever been so bored by him that he’s considered smothering him.
But Katie knew it was a sin, had known from the moment she made the decision to lie with Adam. However, the transgression wasn't making love without the sanction of marriage. It was that for the first time in her life, Katie had put herself first. Pu...
People only go to the places they have visited first in their minds," she says, uttering the phrase as if secrets to the universe have just been shared. "Perhaps that is how learning can help you. However, first you must see it, feel it, and then bel...
Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provide...
Forgetting who you are is so much more complicated than simply forgetting your name. It's also forgetting your dreams. Your aspirations. What makes you happy. What you pray you'll never have to live without. It's meeting yourself for the first time, ...
The girl who climbed up the water tower. We would have counted her an accident until the medical examiner found breaks and fractures from her hips to her heels. "You fall head first," he said. "Feet first's a jump.
Large bodies of goal achievement research encourage written goals for good reason. When we write down our goals, we transform what we imagine into reality.
Jake went in, aware that he had, for the first time in three weeks, opened a door without hoping madly to find another world on the other side. A bell jingled overhead. The mild, spicy smell of old books hit him, and the smell was somehow like coming...
Stories not only give us a much needed practice on figuring out what makes people tick, they give us insight into how we tick.
One of my favorites is one called 'Rory's Radio' that I wrote about my brother Jeff's best friend growing up - his name was Rory Dunigan. I dedicated my first record to my brother, who got killed in a car accident in 1999, and I really didn't have an...
And this is the potency a first kiss should have: it should be earned. The moments leading up to it should be as tense as a crossbow drawn back. The reader should want it as badly as the hero and heroine, and feel as satisfied and transported and tra...
There is a funny story I always tell my students...when I came for the first time to the US. I didn’t speak English (Only Spanish) & I saw on every door the word “exit” which in Spanish means Success = Exito. And then I said :”No wonder Ameri...
After Nancy Pelosi became Speaker, we were told, 'She's the first female speaker of the House, so whether we like it or not, we've got to handle this with kid gloves. Don't go after Speaker Pelosi. You can go after other people, but you'll be branded...
Writing the first draft of a new story is incredibly difficult for me. I will happily do revisions, because once I can see the words on the page, I can go about ripping them up and moving scenes around. A blank page, though? Terrifying. I'm always an...
Skylar is my first name and Astin is my middle name, and my real last name is Lipstein. When I was 15, I think my first agent just kind of did it for me. I'm not ashamed, I'm not embarrassed, but she said it was just less specific to one thing and sh...
My first job was to run a concessions cart. Later, I found a position at the Pacific Film Archive. Thus began a long series of jobs, each one slightly better than the last, that continued for a decade, until I sold my first novel, and still goes on, ...
I remember reading 'The Grapes of Wrath' in high school in 1983. My family had immigrated to the U.S. three years before, and I had spent the better part of the first two years learning English. John Steinbeck's book was the first book I read in Engl...
