What about you?You stay by my side day and night and take the hardest hits of them all.Why,Will?Why have you stayed with me all these centuries?You watch me die again and again,yet you never leave. You keep trying to save me, even though you know I'm...
In 1912, a man named Franz Reichelt jumped off the Eiffel Tower wearing a parachute suit he designed himself. He jumped to test his invention--he expected to fly--but instead he fell straight down, hitting the ground like a meteor and leaving a 5.9-i...
The world is filled with people who are no longer needed—and who try to make slaves of all of us—and they have their music and we have ours. Theirs, the wasted songs of a superstitious nightmare—and without their musical and ideological miscar-...
I had a dream about you. I was lonely and you were lonely, and you suggested that we could be lonely together. But I just scoffed because if we were lonely together, we wouldn’t be lonely. So I wandered off to be by myself. Then I got hit by a truc...
New beginnings always had something special—starting at the bottom and making it to the top produced something magical. When you reach your destination, your goal, that’s when it really hits home. Maybe that’s why I felt the way I did. I knew I...
Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a n...
That was when I first observed a phenomenon I now call the "New York Slide": you offer your words to try to communicate and connect with someone, but your words just hit a brick wall the person has erected to ward off human contact- the words slide d...
If you want to hit me, scratch me, punch me, I'll take it. If you want to yank my hair, spit on me, kick me, I'll endure it. I deserve to be punished. Leave your mark on my body. Show me how much I hurt you, then show me again. Because I'm prepared t...
If you do not apologize to Lady Honoria,” Marcus said, his voice so mild as to be terrifying, “I will kill you.” There was a collective gasp, and Daisy faked a swoon, sliding elegantly into Iris, who promptly stepped aside and let her hit the f...
Some boys walk by and you cry, seeing them. They feel good, they look good, they are good. Oh, they're not above peeing off a bridge, or stealing an occasional dime-store pencil sharpener; it's not that. It's just, you know, seeing them pass, that's ...
Dig Deep! When the task at hand seems to be very difficult. Dig Deep! Whenever you feel you're drifting away from your intended course. Dig Deep! When others doubt you and say it can't be done. Dig Deep! Whenever you feel like giving up. Dig Deep! Wh...
I learned that the day "The Viper's Drag" slipped from between my fingers. But whatever might be lost or broken or forgotten is nothing compared to the miraculous rebirth that occurs every time the needle hits the groove. Here is Fats Waller Himself,...
We are not quite novels. The analogy he is looking for is almost there. We are not quite short stories. At this point, his life is seeming closest to that. In the end, we are collected works. He has read enough to know that there are no collections w...
We get a lot of on the weather reports, so when something big does hit, people never expect it. If it's not as bad as the reports predicted, we complain. If it's worse than expected, we complain. If it's just as bad as predicted, we complain about th...
When we were almost to the other campus, I felt the weird nausea hit me. I called a warning to Christian, just as a Strigoi grabbed him. But Christian was fast. Flames wreathed the Strigoi's head. He screamed and released Christian, trying franticall...
No, I can just read you. Finally. I can't believe how blind I was. I can't believe I never noticed. Victor's comment...he was right." She glanced off at the sunset, then turned her gaze back on me. A flash of anger, both in her feelings and her eyes,...
No time spent with a book is ever entirely wasted, even if the experience is not a happy one: there’s always something to be learned. It’s just that, every now and again, you hit a patch of reading that makes you feel as if you’re pootling abou...
I decided I would not go to court to have my mother declared incompetent, I would not fight. I put the car in drive and hit the gas. I felt as if I'd jumped off a sinking ship and was in a life raft with my little girl, my face turned away from the h...
The Engineer smiled (internally, for of course it had no mouth). It was feeling good. It was feeling optimistic. Moving at its current speed, it would arrive back in Ireland in plenty of time to shut everything down before a series of overloads and p...
At the last minute, she bobbed left so that he stabbed the wall she'd hit, trapping the blade in the Sheetrock. As he went to try to get the thing free, she whirled around and nailed him in the gut with her backup blade, springing a hole in his lower...
Dad and I leave town in the early dark. It's the second Sunday of the holidays, and we pack up the old blue car with enough clothes for summer and hit the road. It's so early he's wiping hills of sand piled in the corners of his eyes. I wipe a few te...
