The line of traffic advancing towards the rising sun looked like a procession of the returning dead. Every one of them, solitaries in clean shirts, smoking, checking mirrors to see if their reflections were still there, wore dark glasses.
I think I knew even then it would be my maps that would take me across the world, to places and people unknown and into cultures otherwise closed to me. In mapping them I would come to know them a little and at times my very eagerness pained me.
What if it lines up like it did in the Trojan War ... Athena versus Poseidon?" "I don't know. But I just know that I'll be fighting next to you." "Why?" "Because you're my friend, Seaweed Brain. Any more stupid questions?
All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way-if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enem...
You realize that people take drugs because it's the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world. It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.
Abel was brushing the snow off his parka while Micha was dancing around him, still balancing the plate of cookies, singing, 'We're staying, we're staying, we're staying overnight! We're drying! We're drying! We're drying on the line!
Between here and there is a journey illuminated by the rising and setting of a radiant sun. Don't miss its splendor in your all-fired hurry to cross the finish line.
The thing that most people didn't understand, if they weren't in his line if work, was that a rape victim and a victim of a fatal accident were both gone forever. The difference was that the rape victim still had to go through the motions of being al...
The bottom line is that our government is not intelligent about how it pursues the public interest, because its decisions are not informed decisions (and its interest is generally not the public's).
Look. (Grown-ups skip this paragraph) I'm not about to tell you this book has a tragic ending. I already said in the very first line how it was my favorite in all the world. But there's a lot of bad stuff coming.
That's because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear - the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and...
...he told a story about the days when he was a reporter himself and how he had gotten so close to story that he finally couldn't write it...When I stared at something long enough, the lines blurred and I could no longer see it for what it was. One t...
...there was practically one handwriting common to the whole school when it came to writing lines. It resembled the movements of a fly that had fallen into an ink-pot, and subsequently taken a little brisk exercise on a sheet of foolscap by way of re...
He traced a line in the dirt with his toe. ‘This is a battlefield. Has been since Cain killed Abel. And don’t let it get complicated. Gray it ain’t. It’s black and white. Good versus evil. You might as well choose sides right now.
I’m writing a book, one letter at a time. After thirteen days, I just finished writing “Once upon a time.” Since it’s a fairy tale, it’s obviously a romance novel, along the lines of “All Quiet on the Western Front.
My love for you spans over the lines of my past, present, and future. You are what I love remembering, what I love experiencing, and what I love looking forward to.
In the end, perhaps we should simply imagine joke; a long joke that's being continually retold in an accent too thick and too strange to ever be completely understood. Life is that joke, my friends. The soul is the punch line.
There's a thin line between genius and bottom-barrel stupidness. I hover delicately on a tightrope between the two, wondering where I'll land if I'll ever fall.
Boredom is certainly not an evil to be taken lightly: it will ultimately etch lines of true despair onto a face. It makes beings with as little love for each other as humans nonetheless seek each other with such intensity, and in this way becomes the...
Most of us form estimates of our intelligence, wisdom, and moral fiber that are considerably higher than an objective estimate would warrant; no doubt 90 percent of us think ourselves well above average along these lines.
tiny: but there is the word, this word phil wrayson taught me once: weltschmerz. it's the depression you feel when the world as it is does not line up with the world as you think it should be. i live in a big goddamned weltzschermz ocean, you know? a...
