That's how life works. You know it when you know it. They're nineteen and in love. Alone except for each other. Jobless and homeless, looking for something, somewhere, anywhere here. They're on a sixteen-line highway. Driving west.
This worked out perfectly for me in college, because what nineteen-year-old Virginia boy doesn't want a wide-hipped, sarcastic Greek girl with short hair that's permed on top? What's that you say? None of them want that? You are correct.
There are different types of fancy photographers. Some are big, fun personalities like Mario Testino, who once told me, “Lift your chin, darling, you are not eighteen.” I enjoyed his honesty. Also, I’m pretty sure he says that to models who are...
Did you come of age in those sweet summers of the early nineteen-sixties, when the airwaves were full of rock and roll's doo-wop promise of joy and the nation was full of J.F.K.'s eloquent promise of a New Frontier? I did. Life seemed to be laid out ...
You may think me crude, and probably I am crude, but I am not so crude as I was, for I am clever enough to see that the girl of nineteen who thought herself a genius was only an unusual girl writing her heart out.
Until the Nineteen-Eighties, when Deng Xiaoping designated the area as China's first special economic zone, Shenzhen had been a tiny fishing village. Suddenly, eleven million people appeared, seemingly out of nowhere; factories sprang up, often house...
I remember the first time I went to Italy when I was eighteen, I was in Florence and there were all these eighteen, nineteen, twenty-year-olds gliding past on Vespas with crinkly, long, hair, and I thought I was on the set of a movie. I couldn't beli...
It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day, but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rus...
I'm nineteen tree rings and mashed acorns stop up my veins when I can't clot. Oh god, you beautiful person, I'll let you lick the salt off of my tattoos as if they were wounds, wounds made of ink and stories.
From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzying rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting dow...
[during the Battle of Helm's Deep, Gimli has killed an Uruk-Hai warrior] Gimli: Legolas! Two already! Legolas: I'm on seventeen! Gimli: Huh? I'll have no pointy-ear outscoring me! [kills another one] Legolas: [shoots two more arrows] Nineteen!
Some of you may know my story: How for nineteen years, I worked as a manager for a tire plant in Alabama. And some of you may have lived a similar story: After nearly two decades of hard, proud work, I found out that I was making significantly less m...
Josiah became King of Judah at the age of eight. Joan of Arc led the French Army at nineteen. King Tut led all of Egypt at age nine. Age isn't everything you think it is. Your heart and your spirit speak more than a simple candle count on your birthd...
She'd been in labor for nineteen hours; I completely understood why she wanted to pass the buck. 'You are so beautiful,' her husband crooned, holding up her shoulders. 'You are so full of shit,' Lila snarled, but as a contraction settled over her lik...
I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three... nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole b...
He swore to kill her. She could still see his face when he said it. He was nineteen then. He'd be thirty-nine when released. That was still years away, if there was no early parole. She didn't understand why this had started now, only three years aft...
Do you know how there are moments when the world moves so slowly you can feel your bones shifting, your mind tumbling? When you think that no matter what happens to you for the rest of your life, you will remember every last detail of that one minute...
She suddenly remembered studying the brain in science class- how a steel rod pierced a man's skull, and he opened his mouth to speak Portuguese, a language he'd never studied. Maybe it would be like this, now, for Josie. Maybe her native tongue, from...
Once, I ordered two thousand lady bugs from the local garden center and set them loose in the atrium. I sprinkled marigold seeds in the ficus planters and put gold fish in the lobby fountain. These are things I did with no consequences, no repercussi...
He gave me the key, which I later discovered would open practically every door in the hotel. I thanked him, and I made a small mistake we irony collectors often make: I tried to share an irony with a stranger. It can’t be done. I told him I had bee...
I got nineteen years with your mom. But do you think I would've turned down the idea if I'd known I'd only get one year? Or one month?...There's no benchmark for how life's supposed to happen, Perry. There is no ideal world for you to wait around for...
