THERE WAS ALWAYS a boy in your life that common sense and the prayers of parents told you to stay away from: fast talker, fast car, and fast hands. He was the boy your father kept a loaded shotgun by the door for and met on the front porch if he ever...
Oh, September! It is so soon for you to lose your friends to good work and strange loves and high ambitions. The sadness of that is too grown-up for you. Like whiskey and voting, it is a dangerous and heady business, as heavy as years. If I could kee...
I am back in London in a couple of days and looking forward to Sunday. Here is what we are doing. 1. Going to see my favourite mad transgender folk singer at the Roundhouse. 2. Then I am going to feed you tapas in a little place by Mornington Crescen...
Bill C-9 was supposed to be a budget bill, but it came with innumerable measures that had little or nothing to do with the nation's finances. It was, as critics put it, the advance of the Harper agenda by stealth, yet another abuse of the democratic ...
My grandfather would have loved to have met you," he told her huskily. "He would have called you 'She Moves Trees Out of His Path.' " She looked lost, but his da laughed. He'd known the old man, too. "He called me 'He Who Must Run into Trees,'" Charl...
He did not know or care whether they were wizards or Muggles, friends or foes; all he cared about was that a dark stain was spreading across Dobby's front, and that he had stretched out his thin arms to Harry with a look of supplication. Harry caught...
He read the letter again, but could not take in any more meaning than he had done the first time and was reduced to staring at the handwriting itself. She had made her g's the same way he did : he searched through the letter for every one of them, an...
Ink black hair, dark smoldering eyes with eyelashes so enviably long they cast shadows upon his cheekbones, a dimpled smile and broad shoulders and a height a little over six feet was all that comprised of Logan Jackson. Basically, he looked like he ...
A brick could have been used as a father figure in place of my dad when I was growing up, because a brick may be dumb, but at least it isn’t dumb and interfering in its absence. By not being a part of my life, my dad became a big part of my life, b...
No man as godly as George, the only fault he finds with God is that he made folk with too few orifices. If George could meet a woman with a quinny under her armpit, he would call out 'Glory be' and set her up in a house and visit her every day, until...
A time of ongoing cultural revolution when the adversaries of Christianity have made plain their intent to use the state machinery to promote radical social ideologies hardly seems an opportune moment to discuss how the rights of property might be co...
Perhaps the most extraordinary popular delusion about violence of the past quarter-century is that it is caused by low self-esteem. That theory has been endorsed by dozens of prominent experts, has inspired school programs designed to get kids to fee...
But in this case,” he continues, tracing the line of the plasterwork with one finger, “I feel that there is one cliché that sums up my position so admirably that it would be pure egotism to attempt a more interesting periphrasis. Plain speaking...
The little kids by the water threw their hands in the air and squealed, chasing each other in circles. It was hard to believe that I’d ever been that small. That young. That happy and clueless. They had pain ahead. Heartbreak. Loss. They didn’t k...
Darius held Stark back from launching himself at Neferet, and Duantia spoke quickly into the rising tension. 'Neferet, I think we can all agree that there are many unanswered questions about the tragedy that occured on our island today. Stark, we als...
He died at the wrong time, when there was much to be clarified and established. They hadn’t even started to be grown-ups together. There was this piece of heaven, this little girl he’d carried around the shop on his shoulders; and then one day sh...
I carried [Rudy] softly through the broken street...with him I tried a little harder [at comforting]. I watched the contents of his soul for a moment and saw a black-painted boy calling the name Jesse Owens as he ran through an imaginary tape. I saw ...
They say a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. I took mine and fell flat on my face. As a young woman, I dreamed of changing the world. In my twenties, I went to africa to try and save the continent, only to learn that Africans nei...
Isn't one of the first lessons of good elocution that there's nothing one can say in any rambling, sprawling rant that can't, through some effort, be said shorter and better with a little careful editing? Or that, in writing, there's nothing you can ...
Great teachers often come to us in humble packaging. That little dog held the wisdom of a sage in his heart. I learned from him that healing is not about the success or failure of the physical body, that physical survival is secondary. All creatures ...
Those slight words and looks and touches are part of the soul's language; and the finest language, I believe, is chiefly made up of unimposing words, such as "light," "sound," "stars," "music"—words really not worth looking at, or hearing, in thems...
