But some characters in books are really real--Jane Austen's are; and I know those five Bennets at the opening of Pride and Prejudice, simply waiting to raven the young men at Netherfield Park, are not giving one thought to the real facts of marriage.
As far as her mom was concerned, tea fixed everything. Have a cold? Have some tea. Broken bones? There's a tea for that too. Somewhere in her mother's pantry, Laurel suspected, was a box of tea that said, 'In case of Armageddon, steep three to five m...
I think we should sometimes read stories where everything's different from our world, don't you agree? There's nothing like it for teaching us to wonder why trees are green and not red, and why we have five fingers rather than six.
It feels like last week, but in fact we’re now closing in on five thousand days at war. I always picture Sami as a nine-year-old soccer stud ... and yet there are soldiers in Afghanistan today who were in fourth grade on 9/11.
Here is the door of my mom's house, well-remembered childhood portal. Here is the yard, and a set of wires that runs from the house to a wooden pole, and some fat birds sitting together on the wires, five of them lined up like beads on an abacus.
The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.
She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrased and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all.
Whether we're on the path toward victory or defeat is determined by the very next choice we make. Not the choices from yesterday. Not the choices five minutes ago.
In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all ...
Forty-five years, these people were provided for. Not with much, you understand, but there weren't beggars in the streets or homeless people. Now everyone must figure out a new way to make a living. Selling hats or popcorn or flowers or coffee, there...
Twenty-five years ago I made my vow to love you and to live with you wherever you went," she whispered. "Since you're bound to go, I'd best keep my promise.
I tell people, "Yeah, I went to Harvard University." What I don't tell them is I was only there for five minutes delivering a pizza.
A six-fingered man went to give me a high-five, and I got confused, so I left him hanging. By a noose.
Losing the Internet has forced them to interact verbally instead of microblogging their lives, but a lot of them still talk in Tweets: "Ugh! I'm standing in line at the post office." "I'm not eating the crusts on my sandwich because apparently I'm fi...
Human Dignity has five characteristics : A playful curiosity,a capacity for dreams, a sense of humor to achieve and correct those dreams, a certain flexibility and spontaenity of behavior, a capacity to fight for and save those dreams !
You die." Thad's voice was heavy; the fire was gone. "It's like everyone has a personal window of time that the gateway to Nil stays open for them. It's always one year. Exactly three hundred sixty-five days. If you miss that window, you're done.
Another said , "I don't ask six months, I don't ask two. In less than two weeks we'll meet the government face to face. With twenty-five thousand men we can make our stand.
His love with Lucy bled from his heart as he slipped into a dark despair— a melancholy that only she could sever with her chaste voice and tender kisses. Now in an unreachable darkness, a blindness took hold. A blood lust that would drive him mad f...
Since when are you so 'faithful'? just a couple of years ago you would show up in your tight jeans and borrow our car to pick up one of your five girlfriends. You think that beard makes you a man of God?
The problem with driving around Iceland is that you’re basically confronted by a new soul-enriching, breath-taking, life-affirming natural sight every five goddamn minutes. It’s totally exhausting.
Striving to convey to this beloved audience of one what was going on around me during those five years, I learned the power of language to map a life, to overcome a distance, to focus attention on what matters most.
