When I began writing stories in exercise books I tried to put off all the things I really wanted to write about till at least the second page – I thought it would be like a grown-up book if it became interesting at once.
He gave her a quick, casual kiss on the cheek first. Then came the hug, and it was the hug that always made Laurel’s heart mush. Serious grip, cheek to the hair, eyes closed, just a little sway. Del’s hugs mattered, she thought, and made him impo...
We only came close to dying six or seven times which I thought was pretty good. A minute later Annabeth hit a slippery patch of moss and her foot slipped. Fortunately she found something else to put it against. Unfortunately that something was my fac...
He sat down on the turf, relishing the breeze through the gorse bushes and sucking in pure fresh air. Whatever you thought about goblins, their cave had the kind of atmosphere about which people say, "I should wait two minutes before going in there, ...
Modern wife: A position thought to require great ambition to fill. After initially showing some skill at a maid service or department store, the husband takes her home to find that she has risen too high in the world to generalize that skill, which d...
In the deep, tacit way in which feeling becomes stronger than thought, I had always felt that the Devon School came into existence the day i entered it, was vibrantly real while i was a student there, and then blinked out like a candle the day I left
...I couldn't let go of the thought that it had, in fact, been he, restless and moody Heathcliff. Day after day, he floated through all the Wal-Marts in America, searching for me in a million lonely aisles.
Only two kinds of people can attain self-knowledge: those who are not encumbered at all with learning, that is to say, whose minds are not over-crowded with thoughts borrowed from others; and those who, after studying all the scriptures and sciences,...
You have made a place in my heart where I thought there was no room for anything else. You have made flowers grow where I cultivated dust and stones. Remember this, on this journey you insist on making. If you die, I will not survive you long.
Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we ar...
It was more that he did better being busy, keeping to a routine. It helped hold the black dogs of thought at bay. Also he had learned that a person could be happy with having done the best they could under the circumstances. It didn't always have to ...
Pointed teeth would give one an appearance of ferocity," he said, tapping a straight white tooth. "Although that might require one to follow through with biting someone from time to time, and the thought is enough to make one feel ill. I don't even l...
I didn't set out to discover a truth. I was actually sent to the Outer Fringes to conduct a chair census and learn some humility. But the truth inevitably found me, as important truths often do, like a lost thought in need of a mind.
Dark night lay on my eyes, like a veil of black cloves - dust on my feet, at the beginning of the path of knowledge. Tracer from an invisible hand, a rainbow, fell in my thoughts - I encountered the truth; and truth shall be my light until the end of...
An ugliness unfurled in the moonlight and soft shadow and suffused the whole world. If I were an amoeba, he thought, with an infinitesimal body, I could defeat ugliness. A man isn’t tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.
Apparently he thought he deserved only to be loved--from a distance, though--and given what he wanted. And in return he would be . . . what? Pleasant? Generous? Maybe all he was really saying was: I am not responsible for your pain; share your happin...
Whenever he was en route from one place to another, he was able to look at his life with a little more objectivity than usual. it was often on trpis that he thought most clearly, and made the decisions that he could not reach when he was stationary.
Strolling on the plateau of life, desperate for the mountain, I never thought that I would get this far. It's only art that has carried me through, given me faith in my own existence. But now I am approaching a point in my life where I desire more...
He had always thought there was an answer to all life's mysteries in the stars, yet whenever he stared at them the answer slipped out of his grasp... But he had to think now, and he stared at the smoke-dimmed stars in the hope that they would help hi...
With the music of our singing in the background, I looked at the church candles and thought about the surreal connection between images and memory. The peaceful and joyous candles flickering there during the Christmas ceremony projected warmth, comfo...
The answer to my thoughts is the loud ripping of my shirt when he tears it straight down my back, yanking it forward around my shoulders and imprisoning my arms in the sleeves. “I've got you now,” he says, breaking the kiss and sounding like a go...
