She knew that was not an honest prayer, and she did not linger over it. The right prayer would have been, Lord . . . I am miserable and bitter at heart, and old fears are rising up in me so that everything I do makes everything worse.
Why I felt the need to always disobey everyone around me was beyond me. But I guess being sixteen years old made me susceptible to bouts of irrational behaviour and the occasional notion that I was in fact smarter than everyone else, regardless of wh...
I sat taller, to suppress my impatience. It was infuriating, this waiting. I was thirty-seven years old. And like a child, an infant, really, I was at the mercy of others. Hour after hour of my life was spent waiting.
How did it die?" he asked. "Short circuit," I said. "Old and frayed wires." He looked at me like I was senile. "Could have been disease. Violence. Or, sometimes, things die because we don't love them enough.
I know what you are known as . . . but to me, you will always be Tom Riddle. It is one of the irritating things about old teachers. I am afraid that they never quite forget their charges’ youthful beginnings.
There are stories told to him only at this time of year. Fantastic, magical stories, the old Hollier in the woods finding only three red berries, which peel back in the night to reveal gifts of frankincense, gold and myrrh, Christmas in hot deserts, ...
FROM a six-year-old: Told by a well-meaning friend, ‘Alex, do you know what the one thing is that the more you give, the more you get back? It’s love, Alex.’ To which Alex asked, ‘What about pain?
Look,’ said Tyrena. ‘In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.
He may be incensed, said Dizzy. I've never doubted the old parson's faith, but it has no place in politics. Good God, just imagine if each man allowed himself to be swayed by moral compunctions; we'd never get a damned thing accomplished in Parliamen...
Since the moment I saw her yesterday, I've been looking through the sparkly prism of exhilaration that comes with any old flame. But now, for the first time, I'm not just seeing what I want. I'm seeing what my friend needs.
But sometimes we are not drawn to that which is different from what we know and fear. Sometimes we are drawn to that which is exactly the same.
Man leave the past in the past. That's where it belongs. The trouble with addicts is that they carry bad memories around with them - like old luggage. And in that luggage that's where they carry their blueprint for living. You got to decide what's wo...
You know what I regret the most?” Trinity says, her voice just above a whisper. I don’t answer. All I can think about is how crappy it is that my fourteen-year-old sister already has regrets.
Let me get this straight. The future of our relationship hinged on advice from a fifteen-year-old girl, a probably untrue story from a one-eyed Chihuahua trainer, and me unromantically - yet skillfully - kissing you on top of silverware and china?
She said that one day they would be very old, that the world would be a different place, but it would always be their world, and that the time apart now would be a nightmare from which they would recover - desperation buried under years of happiness.
In the spring of 1988, I returned to New Orleans, and as soon as I smelled the air, I knew I was home. It was rich, almost sweet, like the scent of jasmine and roses around our old courtyard. I walked the streets, savoring that long lost perfume.
I love you. I want to do everything with you. I want to marry you and have kids with you and get old with you. And then I want to die the day before you do, so I never have to live without you.
The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future. It's depressing if you spend too much time reliving old joys. You think you'll never have anything as good ag...
To tell you the truth, I used to consider it a disgrace to be found ignorant by other people. But now, I find that I am not ashamed of knowing less than others, and I'm less inclined to force myself to read books. In short, I have grown old and decre...
O friend, for the morrow let us not worry This moment we have now, let us not hurry When our time comes, we shall not tarry With seven thousand-year-olds, our burden carry
What killed people wasn't a bullet, a blade, a fist to the face. What killed people was a feeling. Left too long. Sometimes in the cold, frozen. Sometimes buried and fetid. And sometimes on the shores of a lake, isolated. Left to grow old, and odd.
