Most locals knew who Della Lee was. She waitressed at a greasy spoon called Eat and Run, which was tucked far enough outside the town limits that the ski-crowd tourists didn’t see it. She haunted bars at night. She was probably in her late thirties...
We leave to monsieur Le Corbusier his style that suits factories as well as it does hospitals. And the prisons of the future: is he not already building churches? I do not know what this individual -- ugly of countenance and hideous in his conception...
Do you think me horselike, my lord?" Realizing the threat to his personage, Blackmoor wiped the smile from his face and replied, "Not at all. I said I think you charming." "A fine start." "And I appreciate your exuberance." His eyes glitered with bar...
A warrior knows death is always a hair's breadth away, but he doesn't dwell on the possibility of his death when he goes into battle. A warrior just fights. He fights to protect his family, his home, his people, himself, and often, the good of man. T...
You're warning me off. There's no need, I assure you. At this moment in time, my only ambition is to get myself through the day ---" He broke off, realising too late what he'd admitted, remembering, suddenly, why he had kissed her in the first place....
In the first few pages, Kundera discusses several abstract historical figures: Robespierre, Nietzsche, Hitler. For Eunice's sake, I wanted him to get to the plot, to introduce actual "living" characters - I recalled this was a love story - and to lea...
Where do you get the right to decide our lives? I'll tell you where. From that little hog's gut that hangs between your legs. Well, let me tell you something... you will need more than that. I don't know where you will get it or who will give it to y...
Panic strikes me when I think about a sentence that isn’t given the chance to live because I don’t have a pen in my hand or am not sitting near enough to someone familiar to speak it to. Especially if it’s a particularly good sentence, a senten...
Wait,” he said. “That’s not a word.” I looked down to where, in a moment of desperation, I’d played zixic on a triple-word-score space. “Uh, sure it is.” “What’s it mean?” “It’s sort of like…quixotic, but with more…” “...
I am more touched, still, that you are trying to understand - through rational thought - that which cannot be understood at all. The divine, as Boehme said, is unground, unfathomable, something outside the world as we experience it. But this is a dif...
My mother, who would always buy her books new, hated it the vintage hardcovers with their cracked spines and threadbare cloth covers. True you couldn't go in there and buy the latest best seller, but when you held one of those volumes in your hands, ...
Casting my eyes on Mr. Wemmick as we went along, to see what he was like in the light of day, I found him to be a dry man, rather short in stature, with a square wooden face, whose expression seemed to have been imperfectly chipped out with a dull-ed...
I watched her with the crab as she ignored all my admonitions that the poor crab just needed to be set free if he was to have any chance of surviving. And God showed up there on that beach to teach me a lesson. Nothing survives when it's being smothe...
The resource of generational history is accorded little attention our society, which seems ever more obsessed with making “new” and “better” synonymous. From my family I became aware of the importance of passing along wisdom from one generati...
My aunt must have been perfectly well aware that she would not see Swann again, that she would never leave her own house any more, but this ultimate seclusion seemed to be accepted by her with all the more readiness for the very reason which, to our ...
This was many years ago. The staircase wall on which I saw the rising glimmer of his candle has long since ceased to exist. In me, too, many things have been destroyed that I thought were bound to last forever and new ones have formed that have given...
When a nation which has long groaned under the intolerable yoke of a tyrant rises at last and throws off its chains, do you call that weakness? The man who, to rescue his house from the flames, finds his physical strength redoubled, so that he lifts ...
Dear Matthew- There's one more thing I didn't get to tell you that night in my bedroom. Here it is: I love you. I'm in love with you. I have been for a long time. This might seem like a strange thing for me to say given the fact we aren't speaking to...
I dined with Legrandin on the terrace of his house by moonlight. "There is a charming quality, is there not," he said to me, "in this silence; for hearts that are wounded, as mine is, a novelist whom you will read in time to come asserts that there i...
I'm not saying that I think one man is better than the other. I'm not saying that either is kinder or wiser or more ambitious, more thoughtful, confident, or able. But the fact is that when I'm with the one, comfort settles into my bones. I feel calm...
I invited a few people to help celebrate your birthday," Cameron said sheepishly. She threw up her hands. "Surprise." "We sort of come with the package," Collin explained. "Think of it as a collective gift from all of us to you: five bona fide annoyi...
