Despite having known him for almost a year, there were a lot of things I still didn't know about Zachary Goode. Like how soap and shampoo could smell so much better on him than anyone else. Like where he went when he wasn't mysteriously showing up at...
Oh, he shouldn't be surprised, he's a Marxist and has nothing but contempt for the bourgeois capitalist press, yet paradoxically he is also somehow an Americanist and a believer in Science and Freedom and History and Reason, and it dismays him to see...
Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one’s own race, nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious. There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray tha...
Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of ste...
You," I surmised, and gestured round. "Thank you." "No," he denied. His pale hair floated out from beneath his cap in a halo as he shook his head. "But I assisted. Thank you for bathing. It makes my task of checking on you less onerous. I'm glad you'...
The coast is an edgy place. Living on the coast presents certain stark realities and a wild, rare beauty. Continent confronts ocean. Weather intensifies. It's a place of tide and tantrum; of flirtations among fresh- and saltwaters, forests and shores...
The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose pe...
Babies of around one year old are often active by day and wake frequently at night, for no obvious reason. Then a mother can feel desparate for sleep yet equally desparate to comfort her baby when he needs her at night. I have spoken to many mothers ...
Her bedroom window overlooked the garden, and now and then, usually when she was "having a bad spell," Mr. Helm had seen her stand long hours gazing into the garden, as though what she saw bewitched her. ("When I was a girl," she had once told a frie...
That's what I want, a mental evidence I can feel. I don't want physical evidence, proof you have to go out and drag in. I want evidence that you can carry in your mind and always touch and smell and feel. But there's no way to do that. In order to be...
Some may see the tortured existence of the musician as one where he's practicing like hell and being alone, I see it quite differently. Having three children, beautiful as it is, burdens you with terrible things often, with strong decision and sleepl...
A proverb in the Old Testament states: 'He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city'. It is when we become angry that we get into trouble. The road rage that affects our highways is a h...
That was enough dialogue for a few pages - he had to get into some fast, red-hot action. There weren't any more hitches now. The story flowed like a torrent. The margin bell chimed almost staccato, the roller turned with almost piston-like continuity...
You know this is wrong." It isn't a question. When he turns, White is still wrapped snug in the counterpane, motionless, just his gaze pursuing the doctor about the room. "I am wrong to do this." The doctor says it as if instructing himself. White sa...
J.M. Barrie: [gives him a journal] Here you go. Peter Llewelyn Davies: What's this? J.M. Barrie: All great writers begin with a good leather binding and a respectable title. Open it. Peter Llewelyn Davies: [reads] "The Boy Castaways: Being a record o...
Jack Crabb: Uh, Mr. Hickock, how many men have you... gunned down? Wild Bill Hickock: I don't rightly remember. You? Jack Crabb: Oh, about two dozen. Wild Bill Hickock: Is that a fact? Jack Crabb: [voiceover] No, it wasn't a fact. In my gunfighter pe...
Adult Pi Patel: [voice over] And then Richard Parker, my fierce companion, the terrible one who kept me alive, disappeared forever from my life. [Pi lies on the sand when a group of locals run down the beach towards him] Adult Pi Patel: [voice over] ...
Scott Pilgrim: Hey so, can this not be a one-night stand? For one thing I didn't even get any. That was a joke. Ramona V. Flowers: What did you have in mind? Scott Pilgrim: Oh, come to this first round of this battle of the bands thing. Ramona V. Flo...
When I was in Auschwitz, I kept asking, why am I here, what did I do wrong? What did my grandfather do wrong? And a young American man, he put me in the right knowledge. You didn’t do anything wrong, he said, the world did something wrong, terribly...
When, as happened recently in France, an attempt is made to coerce women out of the burqa rather than creating a situation in which a woman can choose what she wishes to do, it’s not about liberating her, but about unclothing her. It becomes an act...
Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest for worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something higher, and we must not stumble and fall, nor must we lin...
