I didn't have a drill, so I had to make my own. First I heated a long nail in the fire, then drove it through a half a maize cob, creating a handle. I placed the nail back on the coals until it became red hot, then used it to bore holes into both set...
Paul says in Philippians 4:19, 'And my God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.' Our needs won't be met according to the destitution of the world or to the poverty of our own faith in the moment but according to ...
And Jessamine-Jessamine was gazing at her in abject horror, like someone who has seen a vision of their own ghost. For a moment Tessa felt a stab of guilt. It lasted only a moment, though. Slowly Jessamine lowered her hand from her mouth, her face st...
Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is int...
There's one Baldessari work I genuinely love and would like to own, maybe because of my Midwestern roots and love of driving alone. 'The backs of all the trucks passed while driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, California, Sunday, 20 January 19...
The usual run of children's books left me cold, and at the age of six I decided to write a book of my own. I managed the first line, 'I am a swallow.' Then I looked up and asked, 'How do you spell telephone wires?
Briec removed his clothes and slipped into bed with her, wrapping his arms around her waist and snuggling her from behind. “Izzy?” “That’s just ridiculous,” he growled. She glanced at him over her shoulder. “It could have been worse. I co...
Guy welcomed my breasts warmly. He hugged them like long-lost friends and stared at them with the protectiveness of a mother lion, as if to make sure they didn't decide to get up on their own and leave the two of us alone together in his office. He w...
It is my own personal opinion that for someone to state that an autistic person 'lacks empathy' is to declare ignorance of the reality of autism.
I wish I hadn't cried so much!" said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out. "I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears! That will be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything is queer today.
I couldn't believe it. Something wasn't right. I thought, "Batman smokes cigarettes." I couldn't believe it. "Batman smokes fucking cigarettes." I walked away and saw that Batman was just this stupid guy dressed up in a rubber suit, just as afraid as...
Sorel's basic character flaws had all cemented by the age of fifteen, a fact which further elicited my sympathy. To have all the building blocks of your life in place by that age was, by any standard, a tragedy. It was as good as sealing yourself int...
Merrill Krause - "My brothers have scared off just about any fellow who showed interest in getting to know me." Granny Lassiter - "Well, if a man can't stand up to those brothers of yours, you needn't even consider him. A man ought to be able to hold...
We have invented a moral sense which is rotting now that we can't give it employment, and when a moral sense begins to rot, it is worse than when you had none. I suppose that all endeavors which are directed to a purely worldly end, as my precious ci...
Before you know it you'll be my age telling your own granddaughter the story of your life and you wanna make it an interesting one, don't you? You wanna be able to tell her some adventures, some excitements, some something. How you live your life, li...
From my earliest works written in the 1950s and 1960s, I have claimed that there is such a thing as Islamic science with a twelve-hundred-year tradition of its own and that this science is Islamic not only because it was cultivated by Muslims, but be...
It seemed to me that, were I a gentleman like him, I would take to my bosom only such a wife as I could love; but the very obviousness of the advantages to the husband’s own happiness, offered by this plan, convinced me that there must be arguments...
There are worse things than being robbed..." I could smell the sick old-meat stench on his breath, like he really had eaten my grandmother. "...worse things than dyin' even. You be a good boy, Little Red, and maybe you'll get to live awhile. Maybe yo...
I do not know whether it came from his own innate depravity or from the promptings of his master, but he was rude enough to set a dog at me. Neither dog nor man liked the look of my stick, however, and the matter fell through. Relations were strained...
Last of all, this book owes perhaps its biggest debt to the ultimate models for Kira and Heron and every other awesome girl in the Partials series: my two daughters. May you always have heroines to inspire you, role models to look up to, and the free...
A story, I had learned, through my own constant knitting and reknitting of remembered words, can lead us back to ourselves, to our lost innocence, and in the shadow it casts over our present world, we begin to understand what we only intuited in our ...