He stopped the flyers And by his rare example made the coward Turn terror into sport. As weeds before A vessel under sail, so men obeyed And fell below his stem. His sword, Death's stamp, Where it did mark, it took; from face to foot He was a thing o...
Look at yourself! You're a priest. You know damn well that if I were setting out to make a girl at this moment instead of young Paolo, you'd take an entirely different view. You'd disapprove, sure! You'd read me a lecture on fornication and all the r...
Good Morning!" said Bilbo, and he meant it. The sun was shining, and the grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat. "What do you mean?" he said. "Do you wish m...
I heard a rapid alternation of notes, a vibrating staccato of an ancient instrument, nearly as old as nature herself, a cricket singing in my garden last night, the first time this year. When turning my garden's soil, I often uncover crickets, curmud...
For a long time, she sat and saw. She had seen her brother die with one eye open, on still in a dream. She had said goodbye to her mother and imagined her lonely wait for a train back home to oblivion. A woman of wire had laid herself down, her screa...
No more light answers. Let our officers Have note what we purpose. I shall break The cause of our expedience to the Queen And get her leave to part. For not alone The death of Fulvia, with more urgent touches, Do strongly speak to us, but the letters...
These days every morning begins like a joke you think you have heard before, but there is no one telling it whom you can stop. One day it's about a cow who walks into a bar, then about a man with a big nose on his honeymoon, then about a kangaroo who...
To be strong and true had been the most important task he had set himself since early childhood. Once, as a boy, he had tried to outstare the sun. But before he could tell whether he had really looked at it or not, changes had occurred: the blazing r...
Great wealth can make a man no happier than moderate means, unless he has the luck to continue in propsperity to the end. Many very rich men have been unfortunate, and many with a modest competence have had good luck. The former are better off than t...
In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which are frowning at you from t...
He had no faintest conception till that very hour of how they would look, and even doubted their existence. But when he saw them he knew that he had always known them and realized what part each one of them had played at many an hour in his life when...
Marriage is more than your love for each other. It has a higher dignity and power, for it is God's holy ordinance, through which He wills to perpetuate the human race till the end of time. In your love you see only your two selves in the world, but i...
There is something about Christmas that requires a rug rat. Little kids make Christmas fun. I wonder if could rent one for the holidays. When I was tiny we would by a real tree and stay up late drinking hot chocolate and finding just the right place ...
It was her last breakfast with Bapi, her last morning in Greece. In her frenetic bliss that kept her up till dawn, she’d scripted a whole conversation in Greek for her and Bapi to have as their grand finale of the summer. Now she looked at him cont...
When someone dies they can be any age you remember can't they ' she asked. As I tried to think of a reply she continued 'You probably think about the grown-up Tess because you were still close to her. But when I woke up I thought of her when she was ...
A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an inci...
In the book, hummin bins made castles, and towers up to the sky. They tamed the animals and took care of them. And hummin bins helped each other. They were always good. "When I was done, Ma asked, 'Delly, what are hummin bins?' 'They're like people, ...
Let the preacher tell the truth. Let him make audible the silence of the news of the world with the sound turned off so that in the silence we can hear the tragic truth of the Gospel, which is that the world where God is absent is a dark and echoing ...
Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or fli...
I never heard communism seriously propounded or argued; perhaps I was too deeply preoccupied with my own dissipations; and, as it turned out in the end it was a way of thought that I was denied or spared by a geographical fluke. From the end of these...
He got a good glass for six hundred dollars. His new job gave him leisure for stargazing. Often he bid me come and have a look Up the brass barrel, velvet black inside, At a star quaking in the other end. I recollect a night of broken clouds And unde...
