An alder tree can't become an oak at will. A maple can't pick up its roots like legs, and stride, step by powerful step, along the shore to find the sun. And everything that ever said otherwise--all those years of school, and the plays and moving pic...
I submitted a poem last night to The New Yorker. They said it can take up to three months to hear back. I got rejected immediately.
Have I ever said that Turner once actually had himself lashed to the mast of a ship, to be able to later do a painting of a storm? Which has never failed to remind me of the scene in which Odysseus does the identical thing, of course, so that he can ...
When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill. It was good to be old, no matter what they said. It was reasonable that a man had to be at least 50 ye...
Men broke into their homes, killed their families, threatened you--and you won't let them do anything for fear you'll be hurt. That's selfish. How would you like it if I took your bow and said I cared too much about you to let you fight?
Rena noticed me watching it pass. 'You think they don't got problem?' Rena said. 'Everybody got problem. You got me, they got insurance, house payment, Preparation H.' She smiled, baring the part between her two upper teeth. 'We are the free birds. T...
Surely ” he said, “the great mountains of the world are a present remedy if men did but know it against our modern discontent and ambitions. In the hills is wisdom’s fount. They are deep in time. They know the ways of the sun and the wind, the ...
Quite often it's not about what is said, but what isn't. And even when it's spoken, read between the lines. Listening with the heart is just as important as hearing with the mind.
Are you that afraid of being wrong? One would assume you’d be accustomed to it by now.” He grunted. “Be careful, girl. You wouldn’t want to accidentally insult a man.” “The last thing I’d want to do is accidentally insult you, Vathah,�...
As soon as I turned the key I saw it hanging, the color of fire and sunset. the colour of flamboyant flowers. ‘If you are buried under a flamboyant tree, ‘ I said, ‘your soul is lifted up when it flowers. Everyone wants that.’ She shook her h...
We are going to your father," Mrs. Which said. "But where is he?" Meg went over to Mrs. Which and stamped as though she were as young as Charles Wallace. Mrs. Whatsit answered in a voice that was low but quite firm. "On a planet that has given in. So...
Good luck on your test.” “I’m gonna ace it for sure!” I said, rolling to Wesley’s side of the bed and pulling the sheet up. “Don’t I know it,” he smiled, and then slapped the doorframe. “Oh yeah. If Gus calls, just tell him I was ba...
I do not listen when anyone uses the word immoral," said the Wizard. "In the young it is ridiculous, in the old it is sententious and reactionary and an early warning sign of apoplexy. In the middle-aged, who love and fear the idea of moral life the ...
Jack shook his head. 'Books. What is it with women and books? My sisters were the same. They were always buying books for boys they fancied.' Ellie bent down and picked up the stone and put it on the table. 'It's like sending a love letter without ha...
Aside from infrequent comments ("Cheer up, love," or "It's not Hallo'ween"), no one wondered why a teenager was dressed up as a chic governess. Sylvie approved of Miri, even at the same time as she was confused by her. "It's a style at least," she sa...
I had a dream about you, You were peeing behind a house and when I approached you, you smiled and said to me "Your face makes me happy" I was so flattered by your words and impressed that you could pee and still talk to me. ...
I had a dream about you. I invented and sold shoes that left no footprints, and you were thinking about committing a murder in a muddy area. I said that committing a murder was a bad idea, and that you should commit several murders, but I was just tr...
I had a dream about you. You were a test-tube salesman, and I was the world’s first test-tube baby. You were excited to meet me, and you asked me what I was doing with myself. I said I was a uterus salesman, and that life was good.
But, as I have said, the bugs had no interest in getting us…and no great curiosity or enthusiasm about us as such; from the cowardly cockroaches to the blind stolid ants they wanted only to be left alone to eat and breed and eat and breed, just lik...
So why had he come? He'd said he'd had no choice, but for centuries men had chopped off their own limbs, faked insanity, gone into hiding or to prison rather than to war. Was there some dark flaw in his psyche? Did he have some perverse need to destr...
She gently bit his bottom lip, his ear. Worked her way down his body until she reached the inside of his thigh, then bit hard, breaking the skin, drawing blood. "My mark," she said, looking up at him. "Now you'll go back to your wife with my mark.
