If instead of arranging the atoms in some definite pattern, again and again repeated, on and on, or even forming little lumps of complexity like the odor of violets, we make an arrangement which is always different from place to place, with different...
The reason why Jane’s spirit was not broken was that she had a secret. It was her own special secret and she had told no one else except Peggy. She locked it in her heart and hugged it to herself. It was this glorious secret that filled her with su...
All of us, I suppose, like to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth, bravely and forthrightly, without thought of personal loss or discredit. Certainly that was my conviction back in the summer of 1968. Tim O'B...
From the standpoint of integrity, I think we all need to own up to our dirty little secrets. I believe that when we are open about our own strange desires or unusual lives, it paves the way for others to do the same. In the past thirty years, gay men...
How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal about it; all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation. And it was in her mouth that this culminated. Eyes almost as deep and speaking he had seen before, and cheeks perhaps...
But the loneliness was still on Danny and demanded an outlet. 'Here we sit,' he began at last. ' - broken-hearted,' Pilon added rhythmically. 'No, this is not a poem,' Danny said. 'Here we sit, homeless. We gave our lives for our country, and now we ...
Well I'm not going to hope that you get hurt, but if you do, remember that you're my damsel in distress, and no one is allowed to carry you." "I don't remember signing a contract." "All the more reason to promise me now." "What if you're not around w...
Thanks to my mother, I was raised to have a morbid imagination. When I was a child, she often talked about death as warning, as an unavoidable matter of fact. Little Debbie's mom down the block might say, 'Honey, look both ways before crossing the st...
Konnor said a silent prayer and made his move. He slid his hand over the curve of Grayson's neck and took the gigantic leap into the unknown. He kissed him. A few braincells died the moment Grayson kissed him back. Then a few more, when those perfect...
He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that w...
The labor of self-love is a heavy one indeed. Think for yourself whether much of your sorrow has not arisen from someone speaking slightingly of you. As long as you set yourself up as a little god to which you must be loyal there will be those who wi...
A nod at Beatrice who held absolutely still. "She said she would come with me. She insisted on it. She stamped her little foot at me." He pointed down to her toes as if she were a child yet. Then he straightened his shoulders. "But I sent her back to...
Always preoccupied with his profound researches, the great showed in the ordinary-affairs of life an absence of mind which has become proverbial. It is related that one day, wishing to find the number of seconds necessary for the boiling of an egg, h...
We are all glorified motion sensors. Some things only become visible to us when they undergo change. We take for granted all the constant, fixed things, and eventually stop paying any attention to them. At the same time we observe and obsess over sma...
The name Mary Jo Quinn was written neatly in faded blue marker on the front of the scrapbook, its gray edges frayed with age and wear, as though it had been handled often. Such a memento was a strange thing to find in a used bookstore, especially whe...
I should say we’d reach England by Tuesday or thereabouts, with a decent wind behind us. It would be a lot quicker than that if we could just sail straight there, but I was looking at the nautical charts, and there’s a dirty great sea serpent rig...
Lord!" he said, "when you sell a man a book you don't sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue — you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night — there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real...
The ship's surgeon was a spotty unshaven little man whose clothes, arrayed with smudges, drippings, and cigarette burns, were held about him by an extensive network of knotted string, The buttons down the front of those duck trousers had originally b...
Many black women also kept guns within easy reach. But it is important to mention that women & their use of guns present the historian of the southern Freedom Movement with a particular problem. Many of the women from this era (like the men) have pas...
And, er, these stories about you..." "Oh, all true. Most of them. A bit of exaggeration, but mostly true." "The one about the Citadel in Muntab and the Pash and the fish bone?" "Oh, yes." "But how did you get in where half a dozen armed and trained m...
Finally, I formulate and say a little prayer to God, and since we haven’t officially spoken since my mom and Elliott died that takes up quite a bit of my time. The rest of it I spend on trying to determine what I think love really is and what I act...
