Antonio Salieri: [to Father Vogel] While my father prayed earnestly to God to protect commerce, I would offer up secretly the proudest prayer a boy could think of: "Lord, make me a great composer. Let me celebrate Your glory through music and be cele...
Briony - 18 years old: Dear Cecilia, Please don't throw this away without reading it. As you'll have seen from the notepaper, I'm here at St. Thomas's, doing my nurses' training. I decided not to take up my place at Cambridge. I decided I wanted to m...
Pepper Potts: Come on in. We're celebrating. Tony Stark: Which is why he can't stay. [flashes Coulson phony smile] Agent Phil Coulson: We need you to look this over as soon as possible. Tony Stark: I don't like being handed things... Pepper Potts: [c...
Lt. General Horrocks: Kickoff will be at 14:35 hours tomorrow afternoon. The Irish Guards under the command of Col. Vandeleur will take the lead. Lt. Colonel J.O.E. Vandeleur: [sotto voce] Christ, not us again. Lt. General Horrocks: What'd you say to...
Why has pachinko swept Japan? It can hardly be the excitement of gambling, since the risks and rewards are so small. During the hours spent in front of a pachinko machine, there is an almost total lack of stimulation other than the occasional rush of...
In the language of the day it is customary to describe a certain sort of book as “escapist” literature. As I understand it, the adjective implies, a little condescendingly, that the life therein depicted cannot be identified with the real life wh...
I therefore used the last ten minutes of our classes to recite with them words from the Bible and verses from hymns, so that they would know them and the words would stay with them throughout their lives. The aim of my teaching was to bring to their ...
You learn more about life and people in two hours of war than in four decades of peace. War is dirty, sure, war is senseless, but come on! Civilian life is also senseless, in its sameness and it's reasonableness and because it dulls the instincts. Th...
I am a shadow. I walk the wet roads under the dim light of the pale lamps, in the darkest hour of the cold dull nights. I walk past the silent graveyard of the dead memories, towards the city of chaos plagued with gloom. I do not exist, but in the ey...
The English major is, first of all, a reader. She's got a book pup-tented in front of her nose many hours a day; her Kindle glows softly late into the night. But there are readers and there are readers. There are people who read to anesthetize themse...
That’s part of being an endurance athlete. Who in their right mind wouldn’t find excuses to escape an hour or more of suffering? Excuses always lead to a reckoning. We find reasons not to take that first step out the door, just as we find ways to...
Instant Reading. A certain famous Fakir was claiming in the village that he could teach an illiterate person to read by a lightning technique. Nasrudin stepped out of the crowd: 'Very well, teach me – now.' The Fakir touched the Mulla's forehead, a...
I'm seven hundred years old, Alexander. I know when something isn't going to work. You won't even admit I exist to your parents." Alec stared at him. "I thought you were three hundred! You're seven huundred years old?" "Well," Magnus amended, "eight ...
She ate quickly. Hunger was a sensation so long situated in his abdomen he felt it as he would an inflamed organ. He took his time, tonguing the pulp into a little oval and resting it against his cheek like a lozenge. If the bread wouldn't fill his s...
So in this Hemisphere when the moon goes down, I sit in one of those all-night-into-mornings cafes, watching short short skies below the skyscrapers and low-rises and sense the big turntables turning and the roadies setting up from stadium to stadium...
Like the Nazis, the cadres of jihad have a death wish that sets the seal on their nihilism. The goal of a world run by an oligarchy in possession of Teutonic genes, who may kill or enslave other 'races' according to need, is not more unrealizable tha...
Invariably, I will be referred to Gleason Archer's massive Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, a heavy volume that seeks to provide the reader with sound explanations for every conceivable puzzle found within the Bible - from whether God approved of ...
His hair was shorter than I remembered, tawny in this half-light, the tousled edges casually framing the clean, commanding lines of his face. His mouth, normally so stern was relaxed now and as I stared a slight sweet smile touched his lips, its curv...
What a night it was! The jagged masses of heavy dark cloud were rolling at intervals from horizon to horizon, and thin white wreaths covered the stars. Through all the rush of the cloud river the moon swam, breasting the waves and disappearing again ...
...hanging out does not make one an artist. A secondhand wardrobe does not make one an artist. Neither do a hair-trigger temper, melancholic nature, propensity for tears, hating your parents, nor even HIV - I hate to say it - none of these make one a...
Most people don't see half of what's in front of them. Your visual cortex does a shit load of imaging processing before the signal even gets to your brain, whose priorities are still checking the ancestral Savannah for dangerous predators, edible ber...
