All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the compost heap, where over time it has rotted down to a...
If ever you have had a romantic, uncalculating friendship, - a boundless worship and belief in some hero of your soul, - if ever you have so loved, that all cold prudence, all selfish worldly considerations have gone down like drift-wood before a riv...
She’s kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she’s turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only known complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named a...
Your young, sitting back thinking about your future, you feel heavily in your heart your desire to create your dream; no matter the tasks set before you. You hold that feeling; close to you, and you age. Your told to grow up, get a job and become suc...
I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental...
Not long ago, having expressed some disagreements in print with an old comrade of long standing, I was sent a response that he had published in an obscure newspaper. This riposte referred to my opinions as ‘racist.’ I would obviously scorn to den...
If I understand you rightly, you had formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to-- Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age...
Much of life, fatherhood included, is the story of knowledge acquired too late: if only I’d known then what I know now, how much smarter, abler, stronger, I would have been. But nothing really prepares you for kids, for the swells of emotion that r...
Most of us are not raised to actively encounter our destiny. We may not know that we have one. As children, we are seldom told we have a place in life that is uniquely ours alone. Instead, we are encouraged to believe that our life should somehow ful...
Mercedes: Is Viscount Torville dead? Fernand: Well, unless his heart is situated somewhere other than the left side of his chest, I suspect he is. Mercedes: [choking up, and making the sign of the cross] God grant him peace. He did no more than defen...
Ellerby: This unit is new, and you are the newest members of it. You have been selected from the basis of intelligence and aptitude. This is an elite unit. Our job is to smash, or marginally disrupt, organized crime in the city by enhanced cooperatio...
Maximus: Five thousand of my men are out there in the freezing mud. Three thousand of them are bloodied and cleaved. Two thousand will never leave this place. I will not believe that they fought and died for nothing. Marcus Aurelius: And what would y...
Simon Marshall: If you don't cooperate, you won't get to meet Susan. George: And who's this Susan when she's at home? Simon Marshall: Only Susan Canby, our resident teenager. George: Oh! You mean that posh bird who gets everything wrong? Simon Marsha...
Stanley Kowalski: How about a few more details on that subject... Let's cop a gander at the bill of sale... What do you mean? She didn't show you no papers, no deed of sale or nothin' like that?... Well then, what was it then? Given away to charity?....
[a large body of German troops led by field security chief Colonel Weissner storm into the guesthouse pub in a raid] Col. Weissner: [addressing the crowd] Attention! We are looking for four or five Alpinekorps deserters from Studguardt. To escape the...
Solomon Northup: [Solomon awakens Armsby in the middle of the night. He offers him a handful of coins] The proceeds of my fiddling performances. A few picayunes, but all I have in the world. I promise them to you if you will do me the favor I require...
Angela Hayes: I'm serious. He just pulled down his pants and yanked it out. You know, like, "Say hello to Mr. Happy." Playground Girl #1: Gross. Angela Hayes: It wasn't gross. It was kinda cool. Playground Girl #1: So did you do it with him? Angela H...
Alice: Well, when one's lost, I suppose it's good advice to stay where you are, until someone finds you. But who'd ever think to look for me here? [sigh] Alice: Good advice. If I listened earlier, I wouldn't be here. But that's just the trouble with ...
Because instant and credible information has to be given, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be rectified, they will stay on in the readers' memory. How many hasty, im...
I know more about my father than I used to know: I know he wanted to be a pilot in the war but could not, because the work he did was considered essential to the war effort… I know he grew up on a farm in the backwoods of Nova Scotia, where they di...
When my sister was released from the mental hospital, she came to live with me in the tilting and crumbling one-bedroom house I'd bought with the small amount of money I inherited when our parents died. She arrived one afternoon unannounced in a taxi...
