Before he could stop himself, Carlos pulled Michael down into a kiss, letting his lips and tongue communicate everything he'd been bottling up for days – months, if he was being honest with himself. Michael responded with a tenderness that begged t...
I have more online contacts than I can count. I make about one hundred connections a day. I have access to millions of people. I use to think that I had friends in these numbers. But virtual friends are like stars stretched out in the sky. They’re ...
Oh, you mean fairy gossip, Eric,” she giggled. “I get the picture,” she said fluttering her lacy wings. “Don’t look so sad, Eric. There isn’t a day that passes when your nosy beak doesn’t find its way into someone’s business. I’m su...
An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish. It was like a shadow, like a mist passing across her soul's summer day. It was strange and unfamiliar; it...
I'm looking for a man" Bree started. "Aren't we all, dear? All I got's bread and doughnuts, but they're the next best thing" "I don't know about that .. well maybe doughnuts. I've lost my .. friend. He's tall-sixfour-longish dark hair, wearing a kilt...
Transience is the force of time that makes a ghost of every experience. There was never a dawn, regardless how beautiful or promising, that did not grow into a noontime. There was never a noon that did not fall into afternoon. There was never an afte...
He doesn’t want to step out of the present, this present. Because once he does, there will be college applications and college acceptances (just one will do) and the last of everything (last class, last party, last night, last day, last goodbye), a...
The fever, I realized, had gone. Beneath my feet, the hardwood floor felt cool on my feet, the air gentle against my itching legs. This was just the world, after all. Big, thoroughly mapped place to sell joy or buy it, hunt company or flee it, trust ...
During those days of whirling about the globe, I had an epiphany: travel was the only area of my life where I had no expectations. I anticipated nothing while fully engaging each moment. What bred adventure, surprise and deep experience was not knowi...
The world isn’t perfect, and some days it wears you down. You can either accept that, and face it, and be a help to others instead of a hindrance. Or you can decide the rules are too tough and they shouldn’t apply to you, and you can ignore them ...
More than that, the thought rattled uncomfortably in my child brain that I would one day become one of them. My body then was sexless. Though I had seen the curves of adults, I couldn’t fathom the chrysalis that would turn my featureless body into ...
And leaning on the windowsill to enjoy the day, gazing at the variegated mass of the whole city, just one thought fills my soul: that I profoundly wish to die, to cease, to see no more light shining on this city or any city, to think no more, to feel...
I let my head fall back, and I gazed into the Eternal Blue Sky. It was morning. Some of the sky was yellow, some the softest blue. One small cloud scuttled along. Strange how everything below can be such death and chaos and pain while above the sky i...
Did not Socrates, all the while he unflinchingly refused to concede one iota of loyalty to his daemon, obey with equal fidelity and equanimity the command of his earthly master, the State? His conscience he followed, alive; his country he served, dyi...
I’m the least fanciful guy around, but on nights when I wonder whether there was any point to my day, I think about this: the first thing we ever did, when we started turning into humans, was draw a line across the cave door and say: Wild stays out...
People cry, Bran.” “They do,” he said in a very low voice. “And when my mother’s cries turn into wails, Mattalina, a lot of people die. And she has to live with the blood of every one of those deaths coating her days, her nights, her clothe...
We find our own way to right action, and tread it as we go. He who tells his neighbour what he, the neighbour, should do in given circumstances is a fool. He does not and he cannot know. 'If I were you' is a silly beginning to any remark. You are not...
Again the ranch is on the market and they’ve shipped out the last of the horses, paid everybody off the day before, the owner saying, ‘Give them to the real estate shark, I’m out a here,” dropping the keys in Ennis’s hand. He might have to ...
How did the hearing go?” she asked. “We won, sort of,” Kaldar said. “We die at dawn.” “The court gave the Sheeriles twenty-four hours,” William corrected. “Yes, but ‘we die at dawn the day after tomorrow’ doesn’t sound nearly as...
Souraya thought those days that she knew so many songs about the misery of love because pain kept love within the boundaries of time, and knowable, whereas what she was experiencing passed beyond the horizon of birth and death; it was like the eterna...
In one of his last newsletters, Mike Ranney wrote: "In thinking back on the days of Easy Company, I'm treasuring my remark to a grandson who asked, 'Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?' No,'" I answered, 'but I served in a company of heroes.
