The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas in modern prose which the lichened colleges present...
Whether Maycomb knows it or not, we're paying the highest tribute we can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It's that simple.' 'Who?' Aunt Alexandra never knew she was echoing her twelve-year-old nephew. 'The handful of people in this town who that...
I know girls who pine for it. They like to play dress-up and pretend being Vor ladies of old, rescued from menace by romantic Vor youths. For some reason they never play 'dying in childbirth', or 'vomiting your guts out from the red dysentery', or 'w...
Old English poetry also contained a wide range of conventional poetic diction, many of the words being created to allow alliterative patterns to be made. There are therefore numerous alternatives for key words like battle, warrior, horse, ship, the s...
She wondered when her daughter would realise that for the most part, people weren't that different. Young and old, male or female, pretty much everyone she knew wanted the same things: The wanted to feel peace in their hearts, they wanted a life with...
Andy was the part of me they could never lock up, the part of me that will rejoice when the gates finally open for me and I walk out in my cheap suit with my twenty dollars of mad-money in my pocket. That part of me will rejoice no matter how old and...
Confidence don't mean jack shit in the real world, sis," she once said. I feel myself finding the courage to trust those words more and more with every twist of the knife. Coincidentally, last Tuesday afternoon I was involuntarily exposed to the punc...
Coincidence sometimes happens as in a fairy tale. Wong was in an emotional state of mind. Still smoking opium, he thought about Kwang’s long-dead father, who had arrived in Singapore from Amoy on the junk Nam Hong. The opium den now felt bare and l...
The gravedigger knew a fine trick. When the worms looked unhappy he would leave his place in the mausoleum and go up into the sunshine. He would go empty-handed, but when he returned, with him came a most exquisite corpse. The worms would rejoice, an...
I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from wi...
I, too, head for the Baths of Caracalla, thinking—with my old, magnificent privilege of thinking… (And let there still be a god in me that thinks, lost, weak, and childish, yet whose voice is so human it is almost a song.) Oh, to leave this priso...
He turned away, and suddenly she thought about the old children's story, where the stupid girl opens the box that God gave her, and all the evils of the world fly out, except Hope, which stays at the bottom; and she wondered what Hope was doing in th...
Formerly, many men dominated women within marriage. Now, despite a much wider acceptance of women as workers, men dominate women anonymously outside the marriage. Patriarchy has not disappeared; it has changed form. In the old form, women were forced...
You know, just because you think bubblegum pop on the radio represents all that is wrong with society, that doesn’t mean there’s not someone out there who needs that shitty pop song. Maybe that shitty pop song makes them feel good, about themselv...
You know when it comes to who should govern themselves, we have old people talking around tables,” Jimmi says. “When you throw religion into the mix, you have a whole new set of problems. You can't say one has nothing to do with the other because...
My dad encouraged me to quit my job and pursue the life that I am about to have. He got excited with me. He was the first one to tell me that I could do it. I am 30 years old, and I still find great power in my own dad telling me it’s possible. I s...
But when we reduce sex to a function, we also invoke the idea of dysfunction. We are no longer talking about the art of sex; rather, we are talking about the mechanics of sex. Science has replaced religion as the authority; and science is a more form...
Viktor was swinging a leather duffle and wearing a black Adidas tracksuit and his favorite brown UGG slippers with a hole in the toe. "Worn and old, just like Viv," he'd say when Frankie made fun of them, and then his wife would swat him on the arm. ...
Mary watched the sunset from her carriage window, realizing that such beauty could never last. Life was a golden glory that faded in the wink of an eye. Life was a village fair that only lasted for a single day. As the carriage rattled along, rocking...
Do you know, Mother, that Haj Salem was buried alive in his home? Does he tell you stories in heaven now? I wish I had had a chance to meet him. To see his toothless grin and touch his leathery skin. To beg him, as you did in your youth, for a story ...
This is a feeling that you had, Quentin, she said. Once, a very long time ago. A rare one. This is how you felt when you were eight years old, and you opened one of the Fillory books for the first time, and you felt awe and joy and hope and longing a...
