Hand-to-hand combat with three hundred pounds of screaming monkey menace is not my idea of a fair fight. My idea of a fair fight is one unarmed, toothless, nearsighted old monkey versus me with a Blackhawk attack helicopter.
I want to be in fifth grade again. Now, that is a deep dark secret, almost as big as the other one. Fifth grade was easy -- old enough to play outside without Mom, too young to go off the block. The perfect leash length.
There are some griefs so loud They could bring down the sky, And there are griefs so still None knows how deep they lie, Endured, never expended. There are old griefs so proud They never speak a word; They never can be mended. And these nourish the w...
If their work is satisfying people don't need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends. At Eden-Olympia work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work.
I started writing poetry and philosophy when I was 17 years old and my mind so was wild. Now I'm 56 and I often want to write like a child.
I love you. I’ve loved you since I was sixteen years old, and I’ll love you until the day I die. And I just… needed you to know that.
I saw an old guy sleeping, and I thought he was dead. But I kept checking his pockets for money, because it seemed like the right thing to do.
With the blood dripping from her lips, with her blood spattered white dress, and with her pale skin, she is just a horrifyingly lovely and a breathtakingly attractive sixteen-year-old girl living in Hell. Nothing wrong with that, right?
It's funny; in this era of e-mail and voice mail and all those things that even I did not grow up with, a plain old paper letter takes on amazing intimacy.
The white noise from the old Walkman enveloped them both; like a blanket of new snow, it draped itself over them, shutting out all the curious looks. And the world under the blanket was - surprisingly, wonderfully - absolutely, quiet.
Trying to change old habits is like fighting a war in your head—a draining and exhausting skirmish that makes you wonder at your chance of survival.
There are not so many murders in this township, I think to myself, and not so few policemen, that a killing should be treated like an old woman who has lost her cat.
...a tall, gaunt man with small narrow eyes set deep in his skull like two old sisters trying to spy out of the windows of their house without being noticed themselves.
If my mom told one more story about how cute I looked in the bathtub when I was three years old I was going to burrow into the snow and freeze myself to death.
And now, my poor old woman, why are you crying so bitterly? It is autumn. The leaves are falling from the trees like burning tears- the wind howls. Why must you mimic them?
And to all the doctors and people who said there was no hope for children with progeria and they don’t live long I want to say, ‘You’re wrong.
Her young soul felt cut up like a fifty-year-old, like a squirrel that appeared content, but carried scars from the vestige of time in its black and gray grooves.
There's in my mind a... turbulent moon-ridden girl or old woman, or both, dressed in opals and rags, feathers and torn taffeta, who knows strange songs but she is not kind.
People are laughing at me today for having holes in my pockets, and ink blood on my fingers- a thirty-something old writer, who strangles words from dictionaries, and feeds on the decay of poetry.
He tried to get drunk, “to forget about life for awhile,” as that old Billy Joel song once said, but the scotch couldn't anesthetize his pain and provide a retreat from the reality of his latest failures.
Jo told me once that she was an old woman everywhere but in her studio. “There I’m only myself,” she’d said. Standing in the middle of masterpieces that only Jo had ever seen and touched, I knew what she meant.
