[...] I'd wake up in the middle of the night to the Star-Spangled Banner and some old film of a flag blowing in the wind, telling you the day was over and it was long past time to go to bed. That was back when days used to end, before CNN and infomer...
The elephant’s love for him was a love I have never known – yet always longed to. For why should he be remembered always, and not I?
Monsters can live inside a person. Sometimes, they know about it. More often, they don’t. The monster makes them feel safe, or at the very least, better. As long as you know it’s there, you can co-exist with it. Give it what it wants, and it will...
I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted into words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness doe...
Dreaminess is, among other things, a state of suspended recognition, and a response to too much useless and complicated factuality. Its symptoms can be a long-term interest in the weather, or a sustained soaring feeling, or a bout of the stares that ...
A little kid asks my dad why that man is chopping down the tree. Dad: He's not chopping it down. He's saving it. Those branches were long dead from disease. All plants are like that. By cutting off the damage you make it possible for the tree to grow...
Her nose was perfect; her lips exquisite. Like a master placing a go stone on the board after long deliberation, he placed the details of her beauty one by one in the misty dark and drew back to savour them.
I don't know about you, but I just can't rule out finding the love of my life simply because he's twenty four years older than me. I'm only sorry you had to wait so long for me to reach the right age to come looking for you.
He had had a severe shock some weeks earlier, when, having narrowly failed to capture a large grey-brown hare for his dinner, it had stopped at the edge of the forest, looked at him with disdain, and said, 'Well, I hope you're proud of yourself, that...
We were right to come here, if only because the ocean reminded you that impossible things were possible. Miles and miles of the deepest waters that moved like clockwork were possible. Creatures like jellyfish and sea urchins were, too. Millions and j...
You’re going to tell me that last night shouldn’t have happened.” No. I’m glad it happened. For too long, I’ve been telling myself that I could spend all this time with yo and flirt with you and not have it mean anything. It does mean somet...
He knew that his father had finally run hard enough and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run clear out of his skin and into the arms of his wife, to whom he had proved, once and for all, the superiority of his love. S...
Just remember, what the French say. No, probably not the French, they've got a president or something. The Brits, maybe, or the Swedes. You know what I mean?" "No, Matthew. What do they say?" "The king is dead, that's what they say. The king is dead....
And my grandmother had bought them in preference to other books, just as she would have preferred to take a house that had a gothic dovecot, or some other such piece of antiquity as would have a pleasant effect on the mind, filling it with a nostalgi...
Some mornings when I wake up, it takes a long time to remember who I am. Like, it takes a while for everything that's happened in last month to download into my brain. It's nice, not knowing. Even if it's just for five minutes.
I already read everything. I read poems and plays and novels and newspapers and comic books and magazines. I read tins in supermarkets and leaflets that come through the door, unsolicited mail. None of it lasts long and it doesn't give me answers. Re...
Now she and I sit together in her room and eat chocolate, and I tell her that in a very long time when we both to go heaven, we should try to get chairs next to each other, close to the dessert table.
But I had learned long ago that you actually probably don't want to know what kind of guy your besties think you ought to be with. It always says as much about what they think of you as what they think of him, and I find a certain comfort in being ig...
Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a ...
I learned long ago that loss is not only probable but inevitable. I know what it means to lose everything, to let go of one life and find another. And now I feel, with a strange, deep certainty, that it must be my lot in life to be taught that lesson...
[Theseus] soon found himself involved in factions and troubles; those who long had hated him had now added to their hatred contempt; and the minds of the people were so generally corrupted, that, instead of obeying commands with silence, they expecte...
