On June 23, 1942, there was a group of French Jews in a German prison, on Polish soil. The first person I took was close to the door, his mind racing, then reduced to pacing, then slowing down, slowing down.... Please believe me when I tell you that ...
Pong had mutated into large stand-up Sega consoles by '82 and here was some extra revenue the guys were well up for. So the space on the left of the entrance was to be the games room. Until two weeks to opening. "Where's the cloakroom?" "The what?" "...
She was a Victorian girl; a girl of the days when men were hard and top-hatted and masculine and ruthless and girls were gentle and meek and did a great deal of sewing and looked after the poor and laid their tender napes beneath a husband’s booted...
I've crossed paths since with men like him. I wish I could say differently. But I have. And what I have learned is that you dig a little and you find they're all the same, give or take. Some are more polished, granted. They may come with a little bit...
Lucy preferred gin and tonics during the summer and switched over to whiskey sours in the winter. At dinner, a sit-down affair with the family, Lucy drank whatever the Temerlins drank, including expensive French wines. "She never gets obnoxious, even...
I don't think I could ever live with either a man or a woman for a long time. Male and female are attractive to my mind, but when it comes to the sexual act I am afraid. In every situation I need a lot of stimulation before I am conquered by the forc...
O Light Invisible, we praise Thee! Too bright for mortal vision. O Greater Light, we praise Thee for the less; The eastern light our spires touch at morning, The light that slants upon our western doors at evening, The twilight over stagnant pools at...
Friction is necessary. Ease of life leads to complacency and the atrophy of the human will and spirit. Within our struggles lives our strength, within our trials lives our triumphs. Friction creates a platform for change, generates heat and or fervor...
Never talk to waiters like that," Kit said. "Can I help it," he said, "if I only went one year to finishing school?" "It isn't manners," she said like a sensible schoolteacher quietly disciplining a small boy, "it just isn't smart." I thought of the ...
Finding The Man. Keeping The Man. Not scaring The Man, building up The Man, following The Man, soothing The Man, flattering The Man, deferring to The Man, changing your judgement for The Man, changing your decisions for The Man, polishing floors for ...
That evening, in her apartment, still in Warsaw, Ana takes down a book from her shelf – a rather thick, ordinary paperback. It looks old, because it's worn out and somehow shabby. But it's not ordinary. I can tell by the way she handles it so caref...
Sanford: Hey, Dante, I'm gonna grab a Gatorade, alright? Dante Hicks: If you grab a Gatorade, then everybody's gonna grab one. Sanford: So? Dante Hicks: So, who's gonna pay for these Gatorades? Sanford: What do you care, you shoe polish-smelling moth...
I hope she can’t tell that I’m appraising her and that I’m completely worried by what I see. She’s excitable and strange. She’s ten. What do people do during the day when they’re ten? She runs her fingers along the window and mumbles, “...
Procuring the house in Ballister was a desperate bid for respect, for recognition, the ultimate gesture (or sacrifice, as it turned out) that would prove him a worthy successor to the Flo and Walter Prices of the world. To my mind, the Culver was Nor...
I don’t want your babies, Felix. I can assure you I’m not sitting up here like some tragic fallen woman every night dreaming of having your babies.” She began tracing a figure of eight with her fingernail along his stomach. The movement looked ...
If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course never be able to speak coherently at all. If the whole of language were present to me when I spoke, then I would not be able to articulate anything at...
Relegated as he was to a corner and as though sheltered behind the billiard table, the soldiers, their eyes fixed upon Enjolras, had not even noticed Grantaire, and the sergeant was preparing to repeat the order: 'Take aim!' when suddenly they heard ...
Does the work get easier once you know what you are doing?" "Your lungs grow thick with stone dust and your eyes bleary from the sun and fragments thrown up by the chisel. You pour your lifeblood out into works of stone for Romans who will take your ...
The ship's surgeon was a spotty unshaven little man whose clothes, arrayed with smudges, drippings, and cigarette burns, were held about him by an extensive network of knotted string, The buttons down the front of those duck trousers had originally b...
I spent the last Friday of summer vacation spreading hot, sticky tar across the roof of George Washington High. My companions were Dopey, Toothless, and Joe, the brain surgeons in charge of building maintenance. At least they were getting paid. I was...
Home is where I take up such a tiny portion of the memory foam; home is a splintered word. His pillow is a sweat-stained map of an escape plot, also a map of love’s dear abandon. (When did he give way, at which breath?) Forgiveness may mean retrosp...
