We pass and leave you lying. No need for rhetoric, for funeral music, for melancholy bugle-calls. No need for tears now, no need for regret. We took our risk with you; you died and we live. We take your noble gift, salute for the last time those line...
Johnson's later life, from 1763, is among the best documented of all literary lives. James Boswell gave himself the enormous task, after Johnson's death in 1784, of producing what is now held to be a model of biography; rich in detail and anecdote, a...
The Renaissance did not break completely with mediaeval history and values. Sir Philip Sidney is often considered the model of the perfect Renaissance gentleman. He embodied the mediaeval virtues of the knight (the noble warrior), the lover (the man ...
At the end of the 1400s, the world changed. Two key dates can mark the beginning of modern times. In 1485, the Wars of the Roses came to an end, and, following the invention of printing, William Caxton issued the first imaginative book to be publishe...
When I was maybe five or six years old, a woman down the street...got flattened by a train. When I got older I realized it probably wasn't an accident. It was a late train and she was so sick and swollen with age she could barely move, so what the he...
I know you,” said Maddy. “You’re -“ “What’s a name?” Loki grinned. “Wear it like a coat; turn it, burn it, throw it aside, and borrow another. One-Eye knows; you should ask him.” “But Loki died,” she said, shaking her head. “H...
Margaret...you must know that you could never change your own life. You are a girl: girls have no choice. You could never even choose your own husband: you are of the royal family. A husband would always have been chosen for you. It is forbidden for ...
Life is the most effective school ever created. Once upon a time they made children bow their heads and read books. It would take ages to get anything across." He taps his head. "But we have widgets and datapads now, and we Golds have the lower Color...
I had to kneel to pull the blade out again, and stayed still afterwards. My heart was a bucking bull in my chest, my hands were slick with sweat, my face itched under drying blood. But for all that, I felt for the first time as I had the night we rai...
I didn't know what to think, but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up. The only think I could compare it to was the feeling I got one time when I walked from the peach stand and saw the sun ...
She had dispersed. She was the garden at Prem Nivas (soon to be entered into the annual Flower Show), she was Veena's love of music, Pran's asthma, Maan's generosity, the survival of some refugees four years ago, the neem leaves that would preserve q...
..the family motto, after all, is 'To Have and To Hold'. We were always a warrior breed, but we don't fight solely for lands and material wealth. There's an understanding, drummed into all of us from our earliest years, that success-true success-mean...
It's only their fight club, Liss," I said, having no need for her side of the conversation, "Nothing's going on. They're going to talk punches and kicking and other boring stuff." Well, actually that stuff was pretty sweet, but I wasn't about to glor...
I’ve seen how cigarettes went from being advertised in every type of media to being something found to be deadly… they can’t kill me no matter how many of them I smoke but I’ve seen humans die from smoking them… if I were you I would stop s...
I only have one story now. The story was heroin. It was made out of sensation, not words; it was invisible and murderous and unstoppable. Sam disappeared from her slowly, like a snowman melting, until all Blanca had left of him was a pool of freezing...
At the same time, we may not as a culture be fond of old-fashioned supernaturalism, but we certainly like spirituality in whatever form we can get it. I suspect that if anyone other than Jesus (Krishna, say, or Buddha) were suddenly put forward as be...
None of us asked for this life. I, of all people should know that our paths were chosen for us and we were just along for the ride, doing what was necessary and expected. There were far greater forces at work here. He was playing my heartstrings, whi...
It's idiotic, it's crazy. If you die and then you're just nothing, there isn't any point to anything. Why do we live at all if we die and stop being? Father wasn't ready to be stopped. No one's ready to be stopped. We don't have *time* to be ready to...
Foreword: Life is tension or the result of tension: without tension the creative impulse cannot exist. If human life be taken as the result of tension between the two polarities night and day, night, the negative pole, must share equal importance wit...
It seemed my whole life was composed of these disjointed fractions of time, hanging around in one public place and then another, as if I were waiting for trains that never came. And, like one of those ghosts who are said to linger around depots late ...
Grin is still beside me. His arms are hung tightly as his side and I take his hand. It is like touching stone and he turns stiffly toward me as we begin making our way back to where Rosso had camped the horses. We are both quiet but I know we were bo...
