Homer Parrish: I didn't see much of the war... I was stationed in a repair shop below decks. Oh, I was in plenty of battles, but I never saw a Jap or heard a shell coming at me. When we were sunk, all I know is there was a lot of fire and explosions....
Laura Dannon: Listen, you're scratching at the wrong door. I didn't know Em well enough to know what she was in. I just got wind of the downfall. Brendan Frye: If you haven't got a finger in Em's troubles, why did her name get me into your rather exc...
Archie Henderson has won no awards, written no books and never played any representative sport. He was an under-11 tournament-winning tennis player as a boy, but left the game when he discovered rugby where he was one of the worst flyhalves he can re...
Children coming forth today have a greater capacity to deal with the greater variety of information that is coming forward than you did. They deliberately are coming forth into this environment where there is more to contemplate. This generation gap ...
I had more to say,” Sin said, still looking frustrated. “But it doesn’t come out right when I try. I always say the wrong things.” Boyd nodded but he was so caught by their proximity, by the green of Sin’s eyes, that at first he struggled w...
Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re cl...
Nearly everyone who is asked where they want to spend their final days says at home, surrounded by people they love and who love them. That's the consistent finding of surveys and, in my experience as a doctor, remains true when people become patient...
When { and and the Göttingen theoretical physicists} first discovered matrix mechanics they were having, of course, the same kind of trouble that everybody else had in trying to solve problems and to manipulate and to really do things with matrices....
Today, specific travel attitudes and methodologies are as carefully calibrated as attire worn on a first date. Which is absurd. It's absurd when it means visiting only the most famous cities and landmarks, strictly hewing to the instructions of the l...
Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Everyone knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if the...
I have always swung back and forth between alienation and relatedness. As a child, I would run away from the beatings, from the obscene words, and always knew that if I could run far enough, then any leaf, any insect, any bird, any breeze could bring...
We never really went to church so AA is the closet thing I had to religion. And secretly, I do like it. All you have to do at AA is: Come to believe that a power greater than yourself can restore you to sanity. That's it. You don't have to believe th...
A single word can brighten the face of one who knows the value of words. Ripened in silence, a single word acquires a great energy for work. War is cut short by a word, and a word heals the wounds, and there’s a word that changes poison into butter...
He rid himself of his own pants, and unlike her, he was naked, his cock hard. He didn't shield himself, let himself be studied as she wished, but his eyes lost the mirth from before as he waited for her next move. Strange. When she approached him, sh...
Standing there, peering around his room, Pete realized something that should have dawned on him years ago: Science really did suck. (Russell was right.) There just wasn’t any point to it. Sure, in its most altruistic distillation, science saved liv...
I looked for that which is not, nor can be, And hope deferred made my heart sick in truth But years must pass before a hope of youth Is resigned utterly. I watched and waited with a steadfast will: And though the object seemed to flee away That I so ...
Be careful of words, even the miraculous ones. For the miraculous we do our best, sometimes they swarm like insects and leave not a sting but a kiss. They can be as good as fingers. They can be as trusty as the rock you stick your bottom on. But they...
But you are crazy.” “I know.” She lifted a small box from the basket. “Do you know how I know?” Scarlet didn't answer. “Because the palace walls have been bleeding for years, and no one else sees it.” She shrugged, as if this were a per...
It may take a decade or two before the extent of Shakespeare's collaboration passes from the graduate seminar to the undergraduate lecture, and finally to popular biography, by which time it will be one of those things about Shakespeare that we thoug...
When you uncork a bottle of mature fine wine, what you are drinking is the product of a particular culture and tradition, a particular soil, a particular climate, the weather in that year, and the love and labour of people who may since have died. Th...
I go to all the appointments. All the meetings. I sit with the team of inclusion teachers, occupational therapists, doctors, social workers, remedial teachers, and the cab driver that gets him from appointment to appointment, and I push for everythin...
