It was a perfect spring day. The air was sweet and gentle and the sky stretched high, an intense blue. Harold was certain that the last time he had peered through the net drapes of Fossebridge Road (his home), the trees and hedges were dark bones and...
Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable feminity....
A tramp, therefore, is a celibate from the moment when he takes to the road. He is absolutely without hope of getting a wife, a mistress, or any kind of woman except — very rarely, when he can raise a few shillings — a prostitute. It is obvious w...
The application of this knife, the division of the world into parts and the building of this structure, is something everybody does. All the time we are aware of millions of things around us - these changing shapes, these burning hills, the sound of ...
Cutting my roots and leaving my home and family when I was 18 years old forced me to build my home in other things, like my music, stories and my journey. The last years I have more or less constantly been on my way, on the road, always leaving and n...
Most Christians are like a man who was toiling along the road, bending under a heavy burden, when a wagon overtook him. The driver kindly offered to help him on his journey. He joyfully accepted the offer but, when he was seated, continued to bend be...
Anybody may blame me who likes, when I add further, that, now and then, when I took a walk by myself in the grounds; when I went down to the gates and looked through them along the road; or when, while Adele played with her nurse, and Mrs. Fairfax ma...
[confronting the Tiger tank commander] Big Joe: Look, Mac, you and us? We're just soldiers, right? We don't even know what this war's all about. All we do is we fight and we die and for what? We don't get anything out of it. In about a half an hour t...
Elrond: You're outnumbered, Aragorn. You need more men. Aragorn: There are none. Elrond: There are those who dwell in the mountain. Aragorn: Murderers. Traitors. You would call upon them to fight? They believe in nothing. They answer to no one. Elron...
[first lines] Driver: Uh, oh. Passenger: What is it? Passenger: [seeing the car behind them] What do they want? Driver: I don't know... just pass me... pass me... Driver: [trying to identify the following car] Is it a cop? Passenger: I can't see. [th...
McMurphy: She was fifteen years old, going on thirty-five, Doc, and she told me she was eighteen, she was very willing, I practically had to take to sewing my pants shut. Between you and me, uh, she might have been fifteen, but when you get that litt...
[Dragon, having a crush on Donkey, is cuddling him] Donkey: [desperately talking] I don't want to rush into a... physical relationship... I'm not that emotionally ready for a... uh... commitment of this... uh... magnitude! Really, that's the word I'm...
[Truman is trying to leave town in his car, with Meryl. He's gone through various obstacles including traffic jams and a forest fire. Now he's hearing a warning siren] Truman: [suspiciously] What now? [they're coming up to Seahaven Nuclear Power Stat...
...we have, each of us, a story that is uniquely ours, a narrative arc that we can walk with purpose once we figure out what it is. It's the opposite to living our lives episodically, where each day is only tangentially connected to the next, where w...
The search began 10 years ago To find a nasty viscous foe They searched in caves and underground But no Bin Laden could be found The President full of seething Calls his Generals to a meeting Have you looked under your noses? Is the question he propo...
Iz," Alec said tiredly. "It's not like it's one big bad thing. It's a lot of little invisible things. When Magnus and I were traveling, and I'd call from the road, Dad never asked how he was. When I get up to talk in Clave meetings, no one listens, a...
We're not going to make it," I said. The words caught in my throat, choking me. What was it Leslie had said to me when we were discussing Shannon's and Antoinetta's disappearance? 'You're beginning to sound like one of the characters in your books, A...
In an essay titled A View From the Front Line, Jencks described her experience with cancer as like being woken up midflight on a jumbo jet and then thrown out with a parachute into a foreign landscape without a map: "There you are, the future patient...
I told her about the best and the worst. The slow and sleepy places where weekdays rolled past like weekends and Mondays didn’t matter. Battered shacks perched on cliffs overlooking the endless, rumpled sea. Afternoons spent waiting on the docks, s...
The first fruit of love is the musing of the mind on God. He who is in love, his thoughts are ever upon the object. He who loves God is ravished and transported with the contemplation of God. "When I awake, I am still with thee" (Psalm 139:18). The t...
--Suddenly the bus driver stops with a jolt, turns off his lights. A moose has come out of the impenetrable wood and stands there, looms, rather, in the middle of the road. It approaches; it sniffs at the bus's hot hood. Towering, antlerless, high as...
