Then one woman looked directly at her husband. "Is our place gone?" "I'm afraid so, girl," he said. "There isn't much left up there. But we're alive. We're all lucky to be alive. We'd have been dead if we'd stayed up above." "Oh, what a mercy we didn...
But one day she handed me some more letters from people who had been researching fruitlessly through old newspapers, hoping to find the "real" events. I remarked that it was sad they wasted so much time. "Yes," said Joan - and then, absently, "but so...
What made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first... it's amazing how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure i...
I love you, he thought, looking at Win. I love every part of you, every thought and word...the entire complex, fascinating bundle of all the things you are. I want you with ten different kinds of need at once. I love all the seasons of you, the way y...
I wanted so much when I was young. I was an endless abyss of want, of need of desperate dreams for myself that defied logic. The promise of what was to come hung like rings around the moon on clear autumn nights; the future was unmistakeable. It was ...
It was like walking into another world. While the mansion was bright, warm, comfy and filled with sound and color, the outside was dark, cold, colorless and devoid of people. I found myself standing beside Thomas in the street. The paved road felt so...
Tibby sat on the outside of a group of kids in the film program. There was a lot of dark clothing and heavy footwear, and quite a few piercings glinting in sunlight. They had invited her to sit with them while they all finished up their lunches befor...
It [spiritual authority and leadership] is not won by promotion, but my many prayers and tears. It is attained by confession of sin, and much heart-searching and humbling before God; by self-surrender, a courageous sacrifice of every idol, a bold unc...
The Bodleian above anything else made Oxford what it was . . . There was something incommunicably grand about it, something difficult to understand unless you had spent your evenings there or walked past it on the way to celebrate the boat race, a ma...
As if this great outburst of anger had purged all my ills, killed all my hopes, I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world- and finding it so much like m...
Nick? Have you ever…” ”No.” He lifted his head again, studied me. “I’ve thought about it, but it never seemed right.” The idea of him making love to anyone else sent a shaft of pain straight through my middle. “You better wait on me, ...
I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent was much more subtle than the ocean's heavy, f...
Mokona: Please! Fai is about to die! Fai: Y... You... can't... While I'm still ailve... Syaoran-kun's magic still lives. Even half of that power is too much... Nothing... will be able to stop him. Mokona: Kurogane: *punches hole in wall* Who told you...
In the year 3,000,002,012 the Andromeda Galaxy may collide with our Milky Way. At first this sounds miserable, like a collision of two bird flocks. But galaxy members fly farly, not tip to tip. In a galactic collision the stars do not actually collid...
Miracles come from love. Miracles come from a seed of hope, a glimpse, a vision of something beautiful that makes our heart sing, something we can fall in love with so much that we are willing to trust and listen to inspiration. We can act on what we...
No," I said. "I choose the prophecy. It will be about me." "Why are you saying that?" she cried. "You want to be responsible for the whole world?" It was the last thing I wanted, but I didn't say that. I knew I had to step up and claim it. "I can't l...
It’s like a man in the trenches again: he doesn’t know any more why he should go on living, because if he escapes now he’ll only be caught later, but he goes on just the same, and even though he has the soul of a cockroach and has admitted as m...
According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 100 grams of fresh tomato today has 30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than it did in the 1960s. But the moder...
Regret and pangs of conscience are feelings we assign to others to make the world seem a little more fair, to even things out a little and provide consolation. In reality, those who do wrong to us never think about us as much as we think about them, ...
There is nothing so difficult to arrive at as the nature and personality of one's parents. Death, about which so much mystery is made,is perhaps no mystery at all. But the history of one's parents has to be pieced together from fragments, their motiv...
The problem with the 'masculinity crisis' is not that women have excelled too much and therefore created a crisis for men, but that we have such a stein inability to let go of what it has traditionally meant to be a man...As long as we perpetuate the...