Katie began to draw in the secrecy of her room, in anger at first, using her mother’s pencils and whatever paper she could find. Sometimes, she had to steal from Nader’s study to replenish her supplies, but it was worth it. She was nothing but a ...
Her nose was perfect; her lips exquisite. Like a master placing a go stone on the board after long deliberation, he placed the details of her beauty one by one in the misty dark and drew back to savour them.
She did not like seeing her loved ones like this, bent over with sorrow; everything in her wanted to cry out, to thrash and scream at the sight of it. But she knew that great grief came from great love, and that their grief was an honor to her. And s...
The process of putting the thing you value most in the world out for the assessment of strangers is a confidence-shaking business even in the best of times. But in Lucy's circumstances it was sheer heroism, a real sign of her devotion to her art. She...
She brushed her lips over his, needing to taste him, to reassure herself of his presence, even if the kiss was relatively chaste. He let out a soft groan, his big body melting against hers as he pulled her close. "Get a fucking room," Gabriel muttere...
All the while she wondered if any strange good thing might come of her being in her ancestral land; and some spirit within her rose automatically as the sap in the twigs. It was unexpected youth, surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringin...
Tonight I can write the saddest lines. To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her. To hear the immense night, still more immense without her, And the verse falls to the snow like dew to the pasture.
Make love to me,” she whispered. “If you make love to me then it is two of us. There is just one of him when he takes my blood, but we are two.” “We are two and more than two,” he whispered in her ear, and then he lifted her and carried her...
When her mother combed Harriet's hair, she said that the woods were disgustingly muddy and mosquito-ridden. During her history unit on pioneers, her father bashfully admitted that he couldn't pitch a tent, barbeque, or fight off bears in a forest. Th...
Enjoy the movie. I hear the guy gets the girl” I said, my tone bold and flirtatious. “Which guy?” She laughed, playing along. I could hear her smile through the phone. It felt good to make her smile. Really good. I paused before answering, “T...
Her [Mrs Croft's] manners were open, easy, and decided, like one who had no distrust of herself, and no doubts of what to do; without any approach to coarseness, however, or any want of good humour. Anne gave her credit, indeed, for feelings of great...
Yes, she now believed that when her body died, her soul would go on. Gods she did not worship, and faith she had none, but love she had and forever. Love alone had awakened her sleeping soul and had made it deathless. She knew she was immortal.
Helen Keller became deaf, dumb, and blind shortly after birth. Despite her greatest misfortune, she has written her name indelibly in the pages of the history of the great. Her entire life has served as evidence that no one is ever defeated until def...
It was more like a movie. Everyone was wearing black, gray, or white except for her. She was in a red dress, and like a herd of bulls, the crowd was angry and made charges against her. Thankfully I was there to come to her defense, like a matador. Yo...
There was no sound, but she felt a movement, a shifting of the air in her room, the warmth of another presence. Isabel opened her eyes. He was there, at the foot of her bed, a single candle in his hand, dressed only in shirtsleeves, waistcoat, and br...
The woman turned to me with a pleasant smile on her face. It didn't waiver or look forced, and her expression didn't appear surprised that Paul was married to an African American woman. Point in her favour. If she became freaked out by an interracial...
Hélène, her eyes once more raised and remote, was deep in a dream. She was Lady Rowena, she was in love, with the deep peaceful passion of a noble soul. This spring morning, the loveliness of the great city, the first wallflowers scenting her lap, ...
The girl who climbed up the water tower. We would have counted her an accident until the medical examiner found breaks and fractures from her hips to her heels. "You fall head first," he said. "Feet first's a jump.
When the only answer a little girl ever receives is no, from her parents or her teachers or her world, at some point she stops asking for what she wants. She begins to expect nothing, so as not to be disappointed when that exactly what she gets. But,...
It had replayed in her mind, over and over, growing in importance till it seemed her whole life could be slotted into two categories. Life before the kiss, and life after the kiss. Her life before the kiss had moved step by step ever closer to the pr...
Music made her feel as if she were holding a lamp that cast a halo of light around her, and while she knew there were people and responsibilities in the darkness beyond it, she couldn't see them. The flame of what she felt when she played made her de...
