I felt the taste of mortality in my mouth, and at that moment I understood that I was not going to live forever. It takes a long time to learn that, but when you finally do, everything changes inside you, you can never be the same again. I was sevent...
What did you think about?" I wish I could tell him that I thought about him, but I lied to him once and I won't do it again. And besides, I wasn't thinking about Xander either. "I thought about angels," I say. "Angels?" "You know. The ones in the old...
For a Siddhar yogi, time is precious. It is important to utilize every moment to evolve into ever higher states of consciousness. We understand stagnancy as decay and for growth, we constantly discard the old to welcome change as the new. We tap into...
They had been there. I had seen my mother’s anxious face, desperate to catch my eye and give me a warm smile. I had tried to smile back, but I had not known how. That old curse again. How to smile. If I smiled too broadly it might look like triumph...
New Rule: If you can force a woman to look at a sonogram—to see what will happen if she has an abortion—you also have to let her see a crying baby, a bratty five-year-old, and a surly teenager to see what will happen if she doesn’t. And you hav...
When I began writing The Night Bookmobile, it was a story about a woman's secret life as a reader. As I worked it also became a story about the claims that books place on their readers, the imbalance between our inner and outer lives, a cautionary ta...
O how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. One knew nothing. One lived and ran about the earth and rode through forests, and certain things looked so challenging and promising and nostalgic: a star in the...
There was nothing to see in the room, but his brain pulled multiple vivid memories to the forefront of his mind. Entering the house as husband and wife, with Angela holding onto his arm. The night his father died in the downstairs bedroom while he wa...
You are mad to be spending the summer in the country, where the days are too quiet and you have so much time to think. In the city you live on Broadway, where the noise is so thick your scary thoughts can't get a word in edgewise. But here in the cou...
I recount as this journey begins where I rest to gather the tale from this same old house resting on the hill, leaving me a view of a carnival once seen from just across the tracks. My pallet is dry now. The colors I see no more. The rain has washed ...
With Cats, some say, one rule is true: Don’t speak till you are spoken to. Myself, I do not hold with that — I say, you should ad-dress a Cat. But always keep in mind that he Resents familiarity. I bow, and taking off my hat, Ad-dress him in this...
Before a Cat will condescend To treat you as a trusted friend, Some little token of esteem Is needed, like a dish of cream; And you might now and then supply Some caviare, or Strassburg Pie, Some potted grouse, or salmon paste — He's sure to have h...
Bunnu was no amateur when it came to escape. And even in his drowsiest moments, he understood implicitly that to forget his circumstances, even for a short while, meant first to forget himself. Who he was and why he was—to strip it all bare and sta...
He looks between the two. "Evie," he starts, as if he's explaining something to a five year old, "You do know that they can say whatever they want to on the package, right? It doesn't mean it's true.""Well, see," I counter, "You're right. But you're ...
It is truth, in the old saying, that is 'the daughter of time,' and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandiz...
One thing, though," Qhuinn murmured. "What?" The voice that came out his throat was unlike anything he'd ever heard from himself before. "If any guy breaks your heart or treats you like shit, I will bust him apart with my bare hands and leave his bro...
Birds and periodic blood. Old recapitulations. The fox, panting, fire-eyed, gone to earth in my chest. How beautiful we are, he and I, with our auburn pelts, our trails of blood, our miracle escapes, our whiplash panic flogging us on to new miracles!...
The builder has ginger curly hair on top of his head, and a thick moustache. He has the look of a McDonald’s manager from 1970 who spends his evenings sitting in the smoky back row of theatres in Soho. He’s tall and muscular with hands the size o...
And again it snowed, and again the sun came out. In the mornings on the way to the station Franklin counted the new snowmen that had sprung up mysteriously overnight or the old ones that had been stricken with disease and lay cracked apart--a head he...
You know what my father said about innocent clients? ... He said the scariest client a lawyer will ever have is an innocent client. Because if you fuck up and he goes to prison, it'll scar you for life ... He said there is no in-between with an innoc...
Slowly he took out the clothes in which, ten years beforem Cosette had left Montfermeil; first the little dress, then the black scarf, then the great heavy child's shoes Cosette could still almost have worn, so small was her foot, then the vest of ve...
