Murder was in fact a fairly uncommon event in Ankh-Morpork, but there were a lot of suicides. Walking in the night-time alleyways of The Shades was suicide. Asking for a short in a dwarf bar was suicide. Saying 'Got rocks in your head?' to a troll wa...
[...] I'd wake up in the middle of the night to the Star-Spangled Banner and some old film of a flag blowing in the wind, telling you the day was over and it was long past time to go to bed. That was back when days used to end, before CNN and infomer...
Percy, we're going to Polyphemus' island! Polyphemus is an S-i-k...a C-y-k..." She stamped her foot in frustration. As smart as she was, Annabeth was dyslexic, too. We could've been there all night while she tried to spell Cyclops. "You know what I m...
It's funny, because I had thought, living through those first two months after the night at the lake, that the great crisis was about What I Was or Who I'd Become or What Terrible Thing Was Wrong With Me (and About to Go Wronger) and Why All Was Chan...
But in his years among the drow, Drizzt Do'Urden had learned to look beyond physical beauty and physical attraction. Drizzt did not separate the physical from the emotional. He was a superb fighter because he fought with his heart and would no sooner...
I sleep with an astronaut’s helmet on my head, just in case I get into a high-speed crash with space during the middle of the night.
I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted into words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness doe...
I generally read every night befi=ore I fall asleep: Brad does too. I find it comforting to lie beside my husband, each of us with a book in our hands. I see it as a period of calm and intimacy, and as the perfect metaphor-together, yet individual-fo...
Decisions to cut aid for the terminally ill, for the elderly, for dependent children, for food stamps, even school lunches, are being made by men with full stomachs who live in comfortable houses with two cars and umpteen tax shelters. None of them g...
I woke up feeling alone, so lonely. The night before, I had cried myself to sleep. I lay there on the floor, listening to the tube trains passing beneath me. I thought, All those hundreds and thousands and millions of people. London, London - I hate ...
You’re going to tell me that last night shouldn’t have happened.” No. I’m glad it happened. For too long, I’ve been telling myself that I could spend all this time with yo and flirt with you and not have it mean anything. It does mean somet...
I have a very addictive personality. If it isn’t women, it’s money. If it isn’t money, it’s speeding. And if it isn’t speeding, it’s women. I also like expensive video consoles where I can punch, kick, screw, shoot and drive legally all n...
I could feel the urgency in the driver’s voice as he prodded the horses to greater momentum. The rumble of thunder could be heard rolling through the mountains as foreboding dark clouds rolled overhead obscuring the starry sky. The sun vanished w...
She had a hand on his belt, ready to show him exactly what she had in mind for the night, when he lowered to his knees between her legs, his hands spanning her ribs. Nervousness had vanished from his expression, replaced by eyes that gimmered with te...
He grew away from old associations, and saw something new in life and humanity. Secondarily, he made close acquaintance with phenomena which he had before known but darkly - the seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon, winds in th...
Tonight I can write the saddest lines. To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her. To hear the immense night, still more immense without her, And the verse falls to the snow like dew to the pasture.
Anyway—because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next—and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis—at any time of ni...
Her problem is with pretty,” Tennyson said. "She thinks I’ll need all these dresses in college. Like I would ever in a billion years pledge a sorority. I’ll pack a few of these to be ironic, though. I can wear them to, like, truck stops at nigh...
Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of...
One of the cafés had that brilliant idea of putting up a slogan: 'the best protection against infection is a good bottle of wine', which confirmed an already prevalent opinion that alcohol is a safeguard against infectious disease. Every night, towa...
And I don't believe in such a thing as "happily ever after". There's only happily every now and then. I find the hardest trick is to recognize the now-and-thens, and to bask in them when they come. Happiness is a choice we make, like how to wear our ...
