The thing is… I was a very proud girl. I never wanted to take the chance I might get hurt. Isn’t that funny? I was game for any exciting adventure that came my way, but when it came to risking my heart, I was a coward.
Pippa's laugh is bitter, tinged with tears. 'Ha! Why do girls think being beautiful will solve every problem? Being beautiful just creates problems. It's a misery. I wish I were someone else.
So I got dressed up kind of Girl With The Dragon Tattoo-y goth. As I head out, I say bye to Mum and Dad, and Mum says, ‘You look cool’, just as Dad says, ‘You look terrifying.
Her eyes take on that suspicious, wounded look girls get when they know they've fallen off the top rung of friendship and someone else has passed them, but they don't know when or how the change took place.
I've never been jealous of another teammate. Sure, some guys are faster than I am, stronger than I am, but none of them have ever tried to steal the girl I love away from me.
I think I miss Ben,” she told Lauren one night. “No, you don’t,” Lauren said. “But sometimes, I really think I do.” Lauren sighed. “Isabella, you miss the essence of a boy. That’s all.
You have a job?” “Do you think I just fucking run this ship so I can call myself captain and get laid?” “Well, no. I thought you were a criminal.
Most kids grow sullen and angry when they’re working through issues, but Thanet mustered up another kind of bull-headed strength. The kind that sees beyond circumstances to what really matters. How could anyone hurt a soul that lovely?
I am, after all, an adult, a grown man, a useful human being, even though I lost the career that made me all these things. I won't make that mistake again.
Every moment of our lives we make choices. Most we don’t even know we’re making, they’re so dull or routine or automatic. Some are beyond explanation—like my mom choosing Wyatt’s memory over Dad and me.
I pretended to be a Cheyenne guide. I pretended to be a prairie woman. I pretended Henry was my old-timey husband taking me to our new homestead. I leaned down and patted Trouble’s neck. “Good boy,” I said. “Trusty steed.
On the best nights, he’d appear outside the bookstore window and wait for me to unlock the door. He usually hadn’t had time to shower between doing things with cattle and horses and coming to find me, and he looked older than us and stronger than...
I wanted to drown inside a woman in the feeling and drooling of the love I could give her. I wanted her pulse to crush me with its intensity. That's what I wanted. That's what I wanted myself to be.
I'm in a foreign land, trying to explain myself, trying to make myself known. Because isn't that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood? He gets me. She gets me. Isn't that the simple magic phrase?
But I understood, now, that we don’t live only for ourselves. We’re connected by millions of shared experiences and dreams and nightmares, all tied together with compassion. I learned that even when we’re going through our darkest winter, sprin...
There are so many moments to remember and sometimes I think that maybe we're not really people at all. Maybe moments are what we are.... Sometimes I just survive. But sometimes I stand on the rooftop of my existence, arms stretched out, begging for m...
I'm not afraid of new things. I'm just afraid of feeling alone even when there's somebody else there. I'm afraid of feeling bad. Maybe that's selfish, but it's the way I feel.
Are you crazy? It's a common phrase, I know. But it means something particular to me: the tunnels, the security screens, the plastic forks, the shimmering, ever-shifting borderline that like all boundaries beckons and asks to be crossed. I do not wan...
It was at times like this that one of those waves of bestiality ran through the mine, the sudden lust of the male that came over a miner when he met one of these girls on all fours, with her rear in the air and her buttocks busting out of her breeche...
She thought secretly that there is no more dangerous item in the world than a pretty young woman on the loose. Luckily, the older woman thought, when we are girls we don’t know that we are like sticks of dynamite or like fireworks in a box too clos...
Try, reach, want, and you may fall. But even if you do, you might be okay anyway. If you don't try, you save nothing, because you might as well be dead.
