Ben Franklin advises his grandson not to let even the American Revolution interrupt his studies, urging of young adulthood, "This is the time of life in which you are to lay the foundations of your future improvement and of your importance among men....
Then he led her to sit by him on a fallen gum trunk, smooth and white, and he leaned to whisper in her ear. Transferred the secret he and her mother had kept for seventeen years. Waited for the flicker of recognition, the minute shift in expression a...
I was crazy in love with you in high school, and you broke my heart the day you hooked up with someone else our sophomore year. Then you broke it again when you promised me you’d dump him the night we kissed and go out with me instead, because the ...
This is my first real memory of James. In every memory before that, he’s just a flash of color, a warm body with a blurred face, a comforting voice begging me not to die. When he planted himself between our father and me that day, an eight-year-old...
I hate my country. There are so many rich people who don't share their shit. They're like spoiled little ten-year-old bullies on the playground. They hog the monkey bars and the slide and the seesaw. And if you complain even a little bit, if you try ...
All these years that I had been waiting for him to return, I had been too anxious and somewhat insecure to develop any plan of action. I had scrupulously avoided giving any thought to it until the time to tackle things head-on arrived, so now I was s...
I didn't bring you here," he said. "You think you're Miss Special Destiny of the year?" "No," I shot back, furious. "And I don't damn well to be - whatever the hell you are. But sometimes there isn't a choice. Right?" "Careful. You might accidentally...
As a teacher of fourth-graders in a public school, where corporal punishement was not allowed, she had years of violence stored up and was, truth be told, sort of enjoying letting it out on Kona, who she felt could have been the poster child for the ...
It may seem like it would take years to see your dreams fulfilled, but when you see things from God's perspective, you realize that He is not limited by time; He can do a lot in a split second of time.
Sun-swept beaches with a light wind blowing From the immense blue circle of the sea, And the soft thunder where long waves whiten— These were the same for Sappho as for me. Two thousand years—much has gone by forever, Change takes the gods and sh...
Wherever your path takes you, may all your deathbed wishes come true, and may you celebrate each and every one of them many long years before your final breath.
Oral Roberts is a greed-crazed white-trash lunatic who should have been hung upside down from a telephone pole on the outskirts of Tulsa 44 years ago, before he somehow transmogrified into the money-sucking animal that he became when he discovered te...
He explained that there was no human penance for my sins. No way I could ever atone for all the things I had done. But…there was someone else who could atone. Who could wipe the past away and give new life. Heal all the wounds — my own and those ...
Women are females and men are males. According to gynaecologists, women menstruate every month or so, while men, being male, do not menstruate or suffer during the monthly period. A women, being female, is naturally subject to monthly bleeding. When ...
Anti-sabbatical: A job taken with the sole intention of staying only for a limited period of time (often one year). The intention is usually to raise enough funds to partake in another, more personally meaningful activity such as watercolor sketching...
A thousand years ago the Chinese had an entirely codified kitchen while the French were still gnawing on bones. Chopsticks have been around since the fourth century B.C. Forks didn't show up in England until 1611, and even then they weren't meant for...
If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worse than ignorant, they are deluded to the point of perversity. They are denying not only the facts...
That year, when the trees burned the fire of late summer into their leaves and the ground mist was a ghost of the river, long and wet and cold, the aunt looked from her windows to the walls around her and imagined another winter inside them. She bega...
He felt an appetite for once, one that it'd take more than a drink or two to satisfy. He strolled along for breakfast at Harga's House of Ribs, the habit of years, and got another unpleasant surprise. Normally the only decoration in there was in Sham...
Immortal.” Melanie paused and stared into space for a moment, her mouth moving with nothing coming out. “That is way cool,” she said finally. “That probably means you’re old. How old are you?” “Hmm, let’s see. I never remember the ans...
Fifty million people die every year, six thousand die every hour, and over one hundred people die every minute. But when thousands of people die in the same place and at the same time, we are more likely to wonder why God would allow such a thing to ...
