Life and study have persuaded me of the openness of history. There is no inevitability in history. Thinking about what might have happened, what could have happened, is a necessary element in trying to understand what did happen. And if, as I believe...
This is something different again. A feeling of peace. The feeling you get when a recipe turns out perfectly right, a perfectly risen souffle, a flawless sauce hollandaise. It's a feeling which tells me that any woman can be beautiful in the eyes of ...
(on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out ...
Eric Schmidt likes to point out that if you recorded all human communication from the dawn of time to 2003, it takes up about five billion gigabytes of storage space. Now were creating that much data every two days
How much leeway do you think any president has? Seventy-five percent of what he does is dictated by circumstance, no matter what. So don’t sacrifice an opportunity to be at the seat of power, friend. To hold a piece of that power in your own two ha...
But back to the coffee. I was here on a mission. I just spent nearly five bucks I didn’t have for some coffee concoction that tasted like the charred remains of Hitler’s soul, and I was not about to leave until I had asked for her phone number.
There are five dangerous faults which may affect a general: (1) Recklessness, which leads to destruction; (2) cowardice, which leads to capture; (3) a hasty temper, which can be provoked by insults; (4) a delicacy of honor which is sensitive to shame...
She put her cup down and sighed again with pleasure. "I can't think how the Nonconformists have failed to discover coffee." "Discover it?" "Yes. As a snare. It does far more for one than drink. And yet no one preaches about it, or signs pledges about...
Though these young men unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to mult...
My parents raised me that you never ask people about their reproductive plans. “You don’t know their situation,” my mom would say. I considered it such an impolite question that for years I didn’t even ask myself. Thirty-five turned into fort...
I was hiking a five-day loop - alone - in the Rocky Mountains when I rounded the switchback and saw a large body on the trail ahead. It had brown fur with a cinnamon tinge that was draped across dense, humped back muscle. A broad head lifted and I co...
It takes a while to master the art of hammock-lounging. At first I could only manage five minutes or so before I thought I ought to get out and go and help a child learn how to swim or something. But after observing the Mexicans' capability for stari...
In this century, the Australian Century, Australia will also have an opportunity to achieve extraordinary feats. Just as the United States dominates world affairs with less than five per cent of the global population, Australia too can make a lasting...
It dawned on him—as it hadn’t before; he was dense, he was slow—that his parents were five hundred miles away. They could make him come home, they could refuse to pay the portion of his tuition they’d agreed to pay, but they couldn’t see hi...
June 17, 1972. Nine o'clock Saturday morning. Early for the telephone. Woodward fumbled for the receiver and snapped awake. The city editor of the Washington Post was on the line. Five men had been arrested earlier that morning in a burglary attempt ...
Who are you?" he asked. I am the future queen of this world, at the very least. You may refer to me as Mistress Koboi for the next five minutes. After that you may refer to me as Aaaaarrrrgh, hold your throat, die screaming, and so on.
If we stop to ponder the paths of our feet, would we: Allow our children to participate in sports or activities that will ultimately consume our family time, dictate our schedules, and cause us to miss church on a regular basis?
8:58 We go to McDonald's. The woman in front of me in line spends more than five seconds contemplating her order. This infuriates me, "WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?? MC-SEABASS?? IT'S THE GODDAMN MCDONALDS'S MENU, IT'S BEEN THE SAME FOR TEN YEARS! IT'S A...
But no one has seen a trace of lightbearers in over five hundred years. Somebody wiped them out. Probably our kind, trying to inherit their magic.” “Probably our kind eating them for dinner,” Finn contributed to the conversation for the first t...
You haven't heard of him? And he is a D'reg!" Mrs Goriff pulled at her husband's arm. "D'reg?" said Angua. "A warlike desert tribe," said Carrot. "Very fierce. Honourable, though. They say that if a D'reg is your friend he's your friend for life." "A...
The Howard Hughes thing hadn’t actually sounded like such a bad deal until about...oh, eight thirty-five this morning. Something about having his ex carry him to the bathroom and help him wash his balls just took all the fun out of becoming an ecce...
