I wish I could say he was a French professor, a French chef, or even a bilingual tutor, but I can’t. He worked in a factory and spent his summer evenings at a reenactment village as a blacksmith or something equally masculine. But it didn’t reall...
Percy pulled Annabeth close and kissed her...long enough for it to get really awkward for Piper, though she said nothing. She thought about the old rule of Aphrodite's cabin: that to be recognized as a daughter of the love goddess, you had to break s...
Whoa." Adrian leapt up and rushed to Jill's side. "You need to let this go. What, are you going to start a fight with some girl?" Reed turned his glare on Adrian. "Stay out of this." "The hell I will! You're crazy." If anyone had asked me to make up ...
I gave my heart to a man who loved me, who wanted to be with me. Who ultimately was afraid of all I offered. I didn’t understand why he sabotaged our future at the time – cheating on me, again, as we were making final plans to move in together. B...
A brick and a blanket could be used as characters in a story full of clever dialogue, such as: Brick: I checked everywhere, and it’s not where I last left it. Did you touch my penis sandwich? Blanket: What? Eww no, why would I touch your peni...
No man can roan or inhabit the Canadian North without it affecting him, and the artist, because of his constant habit of awareness and his discipline in expression, is perhaps more understanding of its moods and spirit than others are. He is thus bet...
There is darkness inside all of us, though mine is more dangerous than most. Still, we all have it—that part of our soul that is irreparably damaged by the very trials and tribulations of life. We are what we are because of it, or perhaps in spite ...
He was prepared to die for it, as one of Baudelaire's dandies might have been prepared to kill himself in order to preserve himself in the condition of a work of art, for he wanted to make this experience a masterpiece of experience which absolutely ...
Cultural wisdom says 'Don't quit your day job.' Yet I think these desires represent our psyche's stretch toward wholeness. And to be whole, as many religious tranditions teach, is to make manifest a unique face of God in the world. We don't want to b...
I’ve never had a reason to survive—no reason to question the way things were. I lived because I was told to…now I live because I want to. I survive because I want to know what is outside the deception we’re buried in, and I want to experience...
When I say ‘I love you’ I don’t mean that I love what being with you does for my career, or I love how often you’re willing to shag. I mean I love you. I love making you laugh, and seeing how you react to things, and getting to know the littl...
The store of fairy tales, that blue chamber where stories lie waiting to be rediscovered, holds out the promise of just those creative enchantments, not only for its own characters caught in its own plotlines; it offers magical metamorphoses to the o...
each of us humans has a moment-if not many-in which we lapse. for some, the transgression involves sex. for others, simply doubt or a rage so all encompassing, it impels us to make irreversible decisions. but whatever the transgression is doesn't rea...
The longing for improvement and the fear of waste and worse - it is a pattern still with us, and maybe it speaks to the medium's essential marriage of light and dark, or as Mary Pickford put it in her autobiography (published in 1955), Sunshine and S...
Something snapped into my thinking then. Told is something that has been, something that is, and something that will be. Told was a noun and a verb. He was an active author. He was Told, he is Told, and he will be Told forever. Only we were in a time...
Gideon: We've established some talking points: we have an intense sexual attraction and neither of us wants to date. So what do you want – exactly? Seduction, Eva? Do you want to be seduced? Eva: Sex that’s planned like a business transaction is ...
I suspect he's sweet on Sophie and doesn't like to see her work too hard.' Tessa was glad to hear it. She'd felt awful about her reaction to Sophie's scar, and the thought that Sophie had a male admirer - and a handsome one like that- eased her consc...
Look, it's easy to outsmart a werewolf or a vampire," Jace said. "They're no smarter than anyone else. But faeries live for hundreds of years and they're as cunning as snakes. They can't lie, but they love to engage in creative truth-telling. They'll...
We need three basic things to live - food, clothing, and shelter. Very few of us actually grow our own food, make our own clothes, and build our own homes. If we do not fulfill our basic needs by ourselves, why do we put so much pressure on ourselves...
Some dangers are so spectacular and so much beyond normal experience that the mind refuses to accept them as real, and watches the approach of doom without any sense of apprehension. The man who looks at the onrushing tidal wave, the descending avala...
how irrelevant the belief in God can be to religious experience—so irrelevant that the emotional structure of religious experiences can be transplanted to completely godless contexts with little of the impact lost—and when he had also, almost as ...
