Trains are relentless things, aren't they, Monsieur Poirot? People are murdered and die, but they go on just the same. I am talking nonsense, but you know what I mean." "Yes, yes, I know. Life is like a train, Mademoiselle. It goes on. And it is a go...
One question in my mind, which I hardly dare mention in public, is whether patriotism has, overall, been a force for good or evil in the world. Patriotism is rampant in war and there are some good things about it. Just as self-respect and pride bring...
I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented b...
Guys who would make fun of girls for sexual inexperience are terrible people, and when girls do it to other girls it feels even shittier. Guys who shame girls who haven't had sex want them to feel like they aren't doing their job, which is to be sexu...
This poetry is utilitarian—heavy-duty, industrial strength poetry. It is meant to be read aloud and, even better, memorized and recited. It is best used in the natural world where there are starlit skies, the warmth of blazing fires, and sounds and...
Hing hang hung! the words rang faintly through his daydream like echoes of Miz Cunningham's tart little doorbell. Then he looked again at the old woman herself. Why, she was really quite wonderful - this old fat woman! In the end, she got her hands o...
I put on slight music I could ignore and started to write. The type of this music I most favored they no longer made. Turns out they asked around one day and I was the only one enjoying it so they decided to just stop making it. Most of the bands tha...
Would you just stay with me? Stay with you? What for? Look at us! We're already fighting! Well that's what we do! We fight! You tell me when I'm being an arrogant son of a bitch and I tell you when you're being a pain in the ass! Which you are, 99% o...
What is clear is that Scripture requires both head and heart, and you need to see it not just as a text but as the very words of God. This will encourage you to pay close attention to the very words he uses, but it will also compel you to feast on th...
A lover of comfort might shrug after looking at the whole apparent jumble of furniture, old paintings, statues with missing arms and legs, engravings that were sometimes bad but precious in memory, and bric-a-brac. Only the eye of a connoisseur would...
Finally Exi spoke. "There are some important things to remember always, no matter how hard life presses at you. One of these things is that wherever you are, and no matter for how long, there must be a home to hold you. You cannot know who you are un...
In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against...
The maid told him that a girl and a child had come looking for him, but since she didn't know them, she hadn't cared to ask them in, and had told them to go on to Mers. "Why didn't you let them in?" asked Germain angrily. "People must be very suspici...
I want to give just a slight indication of the influence the book has had. I knew that , in his second novel, , published in 1935, had borrowed from for his nighttime scene in Trafalgar Square, where Deafie and Charlie and Snouter and Mr. Tallboys an...
A wife! No one else could love a man who had been trampled on by iron feet. She would wash his feet after he had been spat on; she would comb his tangled hair; she would look into his embittered eyes. The more lacerated his soul, the more revolting a...
One might almost say that affinities begin with the letters of the alphabet. In that sequence, O and P are inseparable. You might just as well say O and P as Orestes and Pylades. A true satellite of Enjolras, Grantaire lived within this circle of you...
And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's re...
I've tried to get the angel to watch MTV so I can learn the vocabulary of your music, but even with the gift of tongues, I'm having trouble learning to speak hip-hop. Why is it that one can busta rhyme or busta move anywhere but you must busta cap in...
Sometimes she'd go a whole day without thinking of him or missing him. Why not? She had quite a full life, and really, he'd often been hard to deal with and hard to live with. A project, the Yankee oldtimers like her very own Dad might have said. And...
It has been observed in all ages that the advantages of nature or of fortune have contributed very little to the promotion of happiness; and that those whom the splendour of their rank, or the extent of their capacity, have placed upon the summits of...
Like prepositional phrases, certain structural arrangements in English are much more important than the small bones of grammar in its most technical sense. It really wouldn't matter much if we started dropping the s from our plurals. Lots of words ge...
