When her grandchildren would whine with words resembling 'I'm hungry', my Oma would tenderly correct us with 'No, you feel like eating' which to me seemed be the same thing. Oma had survived Amsterdam during WW1 and truly knew what hunger was. It is ...
I had not seen "Pride and Prejudice," till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and de...
She had that look a child has only a few times in its life, when the child has bettered her betters. The expression isn't smug, though adults often take it for smugness. It's something else. Maybe relief at having confirmed through personal experienc...
It was so important that she should understand something of what his life in this country had been; that she should grasp the nature of the loneliness that he wanted her to nullify. And it was so devilishly difficult to explain. It is devilish to suf...
The full Christian experience, however, is not an individual experience which may be isolated from all else; it is, unconditionally, an experience within the context of the Church. It is 'a personal history which is imbedded in the greater history of...
You aren’t really a nigger-lover, then, are you?” “I certainly am. I do my best to love everybody… I’m hard put, sometimes—baby, it’s never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that perso...
I have noticed more than once in life that a taste for the ineffably twee can go hand-in-hand with a distinctly uncharitable outlook on the world, I once shared an office with a woman who had covered the wall space behind her desk with pictures of fl...
And so I'm me again, Leo. Thanks to the example of a five-year-old. I'm hoping you wouldn't want it any other way. Not that you weren't flattered, right? I mean, to have a girl two thousand miles away going to pieces over you, weeping at the mere mem...
Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another e...
Cyrus wanted a woman to take care of Adam. He needed someone to keep house and cook, and a servant cost money. He was a vigorous man and needed the body of a woman, and that too cost money- unless you were married to it. Within two weeks Cyrus had wo...
Death comes to me again, a girl in a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling. It’s not so terrible she tells me, not like you think, all darkness and silence. There are windchimes and the smell of lemons, some days it rains, but more often the air is dry a...
Moon In the Window I wish I could say I was the kind of child who watched the moon from her window, would turn toward it and wonder. I never wondered. I read. Dark signs that crawled toward the edge of the page. It took me years to grow a heart from ...
The DID patient is a single person who experiences himself or herself as having separate alternate identities that have relative psychological autonomy from one another. At various times, these subjective identities may take executive control of the ...
Every man gives his life for what he believes. Every woman gives her life for what she believes. Sometimes people believe in little or nothing, and so they give their lives to little or nothing. One life is all we have, and we live it as we believe i...
Juno: [as Adam and Barbara come back to the afterlife] You two have really screwed up! I received word that you allowed yourselves to be photographed, and you let Betelgeuse out and didn't put him back, and you let Otho get hold of the handbook! Adam...
Samantha: [after leaving Bill's family for good] Why couldn't we take Randy and Mindy with us? Mom: Because sweetie, I'm not their legal guardian, that would be kidnapping; it's against the law. Samantha: Couldn't you talk to their mom? Mom: I tried ...
Mercedes: Albert, I found the note you left explaining where you'd gone. But now I must explain something to you. Where you've really come from. Albert, you are the son of Edmond Dantes. The man you know as the Count of Monte Cristo. [Albert Mondego ...
Tramp: In Dublin's fair city / Where the girls are so pretty, / I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone. / As she wheel'd her wheel barrow, / Thro' streets broad and narrow, / Crying "cockles and mussels alive alive O!" / "alive, alive O! Alive, al...
[about his wife] Frank Alexander: She was very badly raped, you see! We were assaulted by a gang of vicious, young, hoodlums in this house! In this very room you are sitting in now! I was left a helpless cripple, but for her the agony was too great! ...
Other Father: [robotic] All will be swell, soon as Mother's refreshed. Her strength is our strength... [one of the robotic hands closes his mouth forcefully] Other Father: Mustn't... talk when Mother's not here. Coraline Jones: If you won't even talk...
Flirting Executive: Hello Mrs. Rothstein, how are you? [kisses her hand] Flirting Executive: You're one of the most gorgeous women I've ever seen, you're a lucky man Mr. Rothstein. Ace Rothstein: [hesitant] Thank you, thanks for that compliment. Ace ...