Judah Ben-Hur: What has become of my mother and my sister? Messala: It is not my duty to keep track of prisoners. Judah Ben-Hur: Find them, Messala. Restore them to me and I will forget what I vowed with every stroke of that oar you chained me to. Me...
The bistro was his secret weapon in tracking down murderers. Not just in Three Pines, but in every town and village in Quebec. First he found a comfortable café or brasserie, or bistro, then he found the murderer. Because Armand Gamache knew somethi...
Some of the most memorable, and least regrettable, nights of my own youth were spent in coon hunting with farmers. There is no denying that these activities contributed to the economy of farm households, but a further fact is that they were pleasures...
I call these lessons ‘learned on the fly’ because the knowledge gained from the experiences connected with them were very much akin to the spirit of the centerfielder in baseball running backward at full speed, looking towards the heavens, trying...
But at times words can be a dangerous addition to music — they can pin it down. Words imply that the music is about what the words say, literally, and nothing more. If done poorly, they can destroy the pleasant ambiguity that constitutes much of th...
Yeah, you’re right about having entire rooms full of film and photos… in that Sydney Mines house I have a darkroom, I have boxes of film and home movie footage… I have a few projectors, I have piles of Kodachrome slides… I like photographs. T...
This was different. It had synths droning and sending saltwater waves under my feet. It had drumbeats bursting like fireworks, rumbling the furniture out of place, and then a crazy, irregular, disharmonious, spiral crescendo of pure electric noise, l...
None of it made any sense to her - the deceit, the betrayal, the sheer chutzpah of it. Like something from a movie. Who in real life acted this way? But then she remembered this had happened in India, and India was not real life. The most heartbreaki...
Everyone asks me how I got started into writing. I wish I had some cool story to tell, but the truth is pretty lame. My wife and I were having a drink on our back porch and I mentioned a concept I'd been mulling over. She suggested that I write it do...
It was at a concert of lovely old music. After two or three notes of the piano the door was opened of a sudden to the other world. I sped through heaven and saw God at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defences and was afraid of nothing i...
People who are too optimistic seem annoying. This is an unfortunate misinterpretation of what an optimist really is. An is neither naive, nor blind to the facts, nor in denial of grim reality. An optimist believes in the usage of all options availabl...
We'd never seen anything as green as these rice paddies. It was not just the paddies themselves: the surrounding vegetation - foliage so dense the trees lost track of whose leaves were whose - was a rainbow coalition of one colour: green. There was a...
Whose truth do you want to know, Dr. Amin Jaafari? The truth of a Bedouin who thinks he’s free and clear because he’s got an Israeli passport? The truth of a serviceable Arab per excellence who’s honored wherever he goes, who gets invited to fa...
Martin thought of the iron El trestles winding and stretching across the city, of department store windows and hotel lobbies, of electric elevators and street-car ads, of the city pressing its way north on both sides of the great park, of dynamos and...
[At Q's lab, Q and Tanner try to create a false trail for Silva to follow] Q: It's a fine line. If the breadcrumb's too small, then he might miss it. Too big, and Silva will smell a rat. Tanner: Yes, but you'd think even Silva will be able to spot th...
Willard: My mission is to make it up into Cambodia. There's a Green Beret Colonel up there who's gone insane. I'm supposed to kill him. Chef: What? Oh, that's typical! Shit! Fuckin' Vietnam mission! I'm short, and we gotta go up there so you can kill...
World Security Council: Where are the Avengers? Nick Fury: I'm not currently tracking their whereabouts. I'd say they've earned a leave of absence. World Security Council: And the Tesseract? Nick Fury: The Tesseract is where it belongs: out of our re...
Sundance Kid: Look out there! Butch Cassidy: What? Sundance Kid: Remember a few years ago when we were at a saloon in Denver? We got to talking to some gambler that night, and he told us about an Indian. A full-blooded Indian, except he called himsel...
When the full moon was out the other night, it created one of the most spectacular scenes that I have seen in the Alps. The high glaciers of the Mont Blanc range were glowing an eerie bright blue-white, and they looked like huge ghost ships in the da...
It's over," Keelie said. Too bad. But I want you to know, I will always love you." She narrowed her eyes and said, "When you look at me and say that, are you thinking of Dolly Parton or Whitney Houston?" Burt Reynolds," he said. She nearly spit out h...
What did Finnick Odair want?” he asks. I turn and put my lips close to Peeta's and drop my eyelids in imitation of Finnick. “He offered me sugar and wanted to know all my secrets,” I say in my best seductive voice. Peeta laughs. “Ugh. Not rea...
