My parents always said that knowledge was the best gift they could give me, probably because they were too cheap to buy me Christmas or Birthday presents.
Nico di Angelo ran up to me with a big grin on his face. "Percy, this is awesome!" His blue-feathered bronze helmet was falling in his eyes, and his breastplate was about six sizes too big. I wondered if there was any way I'd looked that ridiculous w...
It's hard to believe someone who walks around commanding so much attention with his acute cockiness, hard muscles, and tattoos would ever let someone like me bring him to his knees-and make no mistake, I bring him to his knees. I bring him to his kne...
I blew that clay pigeon to smithereens. I don't know why Mum got so upset. According to Uncle Andrew she's a crack shot herself. But she says I'm too young. What I'd like to know is how old does a person have to be before they get to do all the fun s...
I was terrified of my weakness, of my sharp tongue, of my every flaw. I was terrified that this moment, my chance to live in happiness for however short a time we may have had, would be ruined because I was simply not carved out of the same wood as h...
I think, actually, that none of us understands anyone else very well, because we're all too shy to show what matters the most. If you ask me, it's a major design flaw. We ought to be able to say, Here, look what I am. I think it would be quite a reli...
You are living far too much in the realms of your head. That is an ugly, mean, scary place to be. I am not just saying your head is nasty, everyone's head is. You need to vacate that premise immediately and start living in your heart. Your heart is a...
Nature is fine in love, fine as in thin and delicate, as in not firm. We move to attach, more than we understand, to things and people we love that we feel might be an anchoring point for this fine, precious love. When those anchors disappear, a part...
It was too easy to lie, when you’d practised it a few times. It was hard the first time, but once it flow from your tongue like the perfect summer breeze, and everybody seemed to believe in it, it became mundane. You’d just have to program it fir...
It’s fall coming, I thought, I can smell that sour-molasses smell of silage, clanging the air like a bell – smell like somebody’s been burning oak leaves, left them to smolder overnight because they’re too green.
Nellie grinned. "I always wanted to go to Venice. It's supposed to be the romance capital of the world." "Sweet," put in Dan. "Too bad your date is an Egyptian Mau on a hunger strike." The au pair sighed. "Better than an eleven-year-old with a big mo...
Everyone has a right to love the land that gave them the things they need to live. It gives them beauty to look at, and food to eat, and neighbors to bicker with and then eventually to marry. But I think... that your own devotion to your familiar hom...
What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition and settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the tr...
He warned Mother not to flout God's Will by expecting too much of us. "Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,' he still loves to say, as often as possible. 'It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the wate...
The Countess was considerably younger than her husband. All of her clothes came from Paris (this was after Paris) and she had superb taste. (This was after taste too, but only just. And since it was such a new thing, and since the Countess was the on...
A too often forgotten truth is that you can live through actual events of history and the underlying reality of what's going. What history misses, the myth clearly expresses. The myth in the hands of a genius give us a clear picture of the inner impo...
The busiest people I have known in my life always have time enough to do everything. Those who do nothing are always tired and pay no attention to the little amount of work they are required to do. They complain constantly that the day is too short. ...
Crowded places, I shunned them as noises too rude And fled to the silence of sweet solitude. Where the flower in green darkness buds, blossoms, and fades, Unseen of all shepherds and flower-loving maids— The hermit bees find them but once and away....
But all those weeks with Nate, however fake they might have been, did do one thing for me. Whether the rest of world saw me that way, I knew now that I was strong, and I was beautiful, just the way I was. And girls like me needed gorgeous clothes too...
Be aware of the abundance of life right now. If you remain stuck in the past, clinging to the baggage of old disappointments or relationships, you block yourself off from the riches of the present. If you worry too much about tomorrow, you can't hear...
I am alone so I dream of the being who has cured my solitude, who would be cured by solitudes. With its life, it brought me the idealizations of life, all the idealizations which give life a double, which lead life toward it summits, which make the d...
