I wish I could say we all lived happily ever after. I can't. But I can say we lived. Our love for Nate lives, and he's left us this piece of himself in his art; it was his gift to us. We know him through his art, and I can take comfort in that. I gue...
Can we reconcile indefinitely these two imperatives: the desire to preserve every individual's special identity and the need for Europeans to be able to communicate with one another all the time and as freely as possible? We cannot leave it to time t...
Sophia was asked to speak to the students of a local medical school. “Sophia, what do we need to be better doctors?” the students asked. “Doctors,” Sophia said, “need strong stomachs and strong powers of observation.” Then she opened a ca...
you cannot be friends either with boy or man unless you give yourself away in the process, and Mr. Pembroke did not commend this. He, for “personal intercourse,” substituted the safer “personal influence,” and gave his junior hints on the set...
Carmack was of the moment. His ruling force was focus. Time existed for him not in some promising future or sentimental past but in the present condition, the intricate web ol problems and solutions, imagination and code. He kept nothing from the pas...
Bianca, camp is cool! It's got a pegasus stable and a sword-fighting arena and… I mean, what do you get by joining the Hunters?" To begin with," Zoe said, "immortality." I stared at her, then at Artemis. "She's kidding, right?" Zoe rarely kids abou...
You know what I used to dream about, in stir?" His voice was hoarse, the words low and fast and faintly guttural. "I used to dream about you. You were the only clean and good and decent thing left in my life, and I would dream about you. I used to dr...
Is Lisa going to the prom?' I shelved my worries for the moment. 'I don't know, Mom. We don't talk about the You-Know-What. We made a pact.' You could go together, if you didn't want to mess with dates and things.' I don't want to mess with the prom ...
The name Mary Jo Quinn was written neatly in faded blue marker on the front of the scrapbook, its gray edges frayed with age and wear, as though it had been handled often. Such a memento was a strange thing to find in a used bookstore, especially whe...
Did you know that for pretty much the entire history of human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? You could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? There was no planning for retirement. There was no planning for a ca...
I know when people think of New York, they think of theater, restaurants, cultural landmarks and shopping,” I told him. “But beyond the iconic skyline and the news from Wall Street, New York is a collection of villages. In our neighborhoods, we a...
I hadn’t gone to Andover, or Horace Mann or Eton. My high school had been the average kind, and I’d been the best student there. Such was not the case at Eli. Here, I was surrounded by geniuses. I’d figured out early in my college career that t...
He was changed as completely as Amory Blaine could ever be changed. Amory plus Beatrice plus two years in Minneapolis - these had been his ingredients when he entered St. Regis'. But the Minneapolis years were not a thick enough overlay to conceal th...
I spent the last Friday of summer vacation spreading hot, sticky tar across the roof of George Washington High. My companions were Dopey, Toothless, and Joe, the brain surgeons in charge of building maintenance. At least they were getting paid. I was...
First memory: a man at the back door is saying, I have real bad news, sweat is dripping off his face, Garbert's been shot, noise from my mother, I run to her room behind her, I'm jumping on the canopied bed while she cries, she's pulling out drawers ...
This happened back east of course. I've heard that term a lot since coming to this part of the country. But I never think of the term as a marker of geography. It's a reference to time, a statement about time, about all the densities of being and exp...
When a man’s face contorts in bitterness and hatred, he looks a little insane. When his mood changes from elated to assaultive in the time it takes to turn around, his mental stability seems open to question. When he accuses his partner of plotting...
Never talk to waiters like that," Kit said. "Can I help it," he said, "if I only went one year to finishing school?" "It isn't manners," she said like a sensible schoolteacher quietly disciplining a small boy, "it just isn't smart." I thought of the ...
He looked like every glossy frat boy in every nerd movie ever made, like every popular town boy who’d ever looked right through her in high school, like every rotten rich kid who’d ever belonged where she hadn’t. My mama warned me about guys li...
They were worried about keeping military families strong. They were worried about the stress and strain of prolonged military service and how it would affect our military readiness the next time a Hitler-wannabe reared his ugly head. As they made a l...
Sometimes people carried anger around for years, in a secret box inside their bodies, and it grew tighter like a hardening knot. The problem with it getting tighter and smaller was that the people did, too, hiding it. Liyana had seen this happen even...
