Elizabeth walked past just as Mrs. Ferguson, pulling down her wide-brimmed hat, announced that teenagers today were the most inconsiderate creatures she had ever seen. 'I'm afraid I have to agree with you,' Elizabeth had heard her twin say mournfully...
Anyone who says, “Here’s my address, write me a poem,” deserves something in reply. So I’ll tell a secret instead: poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes, they are sleeping. They are the shadows drifting across our ceilings the moment before...
That's why I've just gone on … collecting this particular kind of stuff – what you might call riff-raff. There's not a book here, Lawford, that hasn't at least a glimmer of the real thing in it – just Life, seen through a living eye, and felt. ...
Like seeing a photograph of yourself as a child, encountering handwriting that you know was once yours but that now seems only dimly familiar can inspire a confrontation with the mystery of time.
I’ve always found that the better the book I’m reading, the smarter I feel, or, at least, the more able I am to imagine that I might, someday, become smarter.
Who doesn't want a Bad Boy? Hmm... I prefer to let them bake for a while. Those misbehaving boys will rise to irresistible, dominant, and controlling men. When cooked at the right temperature they'll still taste disobedient but with the right amount ...
It was a sad place to be at war; never in all my life have I seen corn grow so fast, nor grass fatten beasts to such weight. The herders of Raphana would have sold their grandmothers for such bounty, although they might have claimed them back again a...
Sometimes she sat and let her mind go blank and her eyes go out of focus, so that she watched the slow, jerky movements of the motes that floated across her pupils. They amazed her as a child. Now she saw them as a reflection of how she moved, floati...
You want me to lie for you?" Aidan asked, watching them. " in me, the way you did in my mama." Aidan wheezed and sputtered. What did she know 'bout him and Miz Garnett? "Please." She sounded like a young gal and a grown woman too. " in me." "That's t...
We were together because we were addicted to each other. I was never as intoxicated as I was when we were happy together, and I knew it was the same for him. We were putting ourselves through the wringer for those moments of perfection between us, bu...
If you are feeling unhappy in life for any reason and often getting negative results, try this -> start replacing negative thoughts with the positive one, make a plan and act on them. The more positive thoughts you have the more positive and happy yo...
So, I guess that's what happens, when you fall in love with that perfect someone you just never want to fall out, because they treat you right, you know, like they give you kisses and they remind you of how beautiful you are, and how sweet you make t...
Did everyone make the most ghastly blunders at regularly intervals through their life and live to regret them ever afterward? Was everyone's life filled with confusing and contradictory mix of guilt and innocence, hatred and love, concern and unconce...
Do I seem one who will not defend myself? You are her father, so I will make myself clear. Any who seek her harm I will kill. I will rip into them with claw and teeth and separate skin from bone from heart. An enemy, a friends, from within either of ...
It is my trade," he said. "I work for the bean family, and every day there are deaths among the beans, mostly from thirst. They shrivel and die, they go blind in their one black eye, and I put them in one of these tiny coffins. Beans, you know, are b...
Government observers, keen on getting the Penan out of the valuable hardwood forests, have claimed that Penan health is poor and that they are malnourished. This is a ploy to get them settled so they can be controlled. Also, it is a source of embarra...
Yet because her needs and yearnings are real and pressing, she must find some way to express them: she puts into body what she cannot yet put into words. Her eating disorder serves as her voice, her attempt to express and meet her needs and desires w...
But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they're bad they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and grow...
People dread silence because it is transparent; like clear water, which reveals every obstacle—the used, the dead, the drowned, silence reveals the cast-off words and thoughts dropped in to obscure its clear stream. And when people stare too close ...
I’ve noticed in my life that the people who act as my angels are not some strange angelic creatures that seem almost untouchable, but are more real than that. They are people who have tasted sorrow, who have felt pain, and in a way, that makes them...
One thing I have learned from many years of watching my father is that some people, the best ones, are motivated more by the chance to prove themselves than by a command to serve. It is the work itself that calls them onward, especially if they belie...
