You know, your first album is about really amazing things. Your first album is always about coming of age, first love, first loss, usually you suffer a first loss of someone that you love to death, even, you know, really big life lessons, things you ...
I wasn't ready for fame and all that brings to your life. It was an amazing experience, but so overwhelming, because no one can tell you beforehand when it will happen or how it will impact you. So no one can tell you how to handle it, being stopped ...
Luna had told us not to drop the rose, not to leave the path. But we never dropped the rose - it was on me the whole time - and we didn't leave the path, not really. We just took a shortcut through the shadows and the brush, something idiots have bee...
And then I realized that my sister was trying to LIVE a romance novel. Man, that takes courage and imagination. Well, it also took some degree of mental illness, too, but I was suddenly happy for her. And a little scared. Well, a lot scared.
I took several long walks in the Wright and adjacent Taylor Valleys. I did not feel insignificant on these journeys, dwarfed or shrugged off by the land, but superfluous. It is a difficult landscape to enter, and to develop a rapport with. It is not ...
Last week I placed a hand-written sign in front of my neighborhood that read, “Lost Mustache. Please do not feed. If found, contact Mouth,” and I left my phone number. Nobody’s called. Perhaps the neighborhood cat lady took it in and is petting...
She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home--Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as the...
I thought you quit smoking." "Did. For recreational purposes." His father flicked open his Zippo lighter. The smell of the lighter fluid filled the immediate proximity. "This is medicinal." He lit the cigarette, clicked the top of the lighter shut, a...
The working people of the Flint area hated this rag, but it was our only daily so you read it. Everyone called it the "Flint Urinal." Editorially, the paper had historically been on the wrong side of every major social and political issue of the twen...
I want you to know, chickens aren’t sexy. Not to me.” This was met with silence. “Are you there?” She was slurring her words now, which was embarrassing, so she took a deep breath. “Cam? Can you hear me?” “Yes, chickens aren’t sexy. U...
Jasper felt the sadness then. A strong sensation of being pulled underwater, of being helpless to do anything but sink. Further into the despair. Until it completely surrounded you. Until every breath you took was just swallowing more pain. Until you...
No, by God, he had no intention of going on like a blind man, plodding down a path of brainless, fruitless existence until old age or accident took him. Either he found the answer or he ditched the whole mess, life included.
She had six months at most left to live. She had cancer, she hissed. A filthy growth eating her insides away. There was an operation, she'd been told. They took half your stomach out and fitted you up with a plastic bag. Better a semicolon than a ful...
I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me ... and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, ...
It comes over me that I had then a strange alter ego deep down somewhere inside me, as the full-blown flower is in the small tight bud, and I just took the course, I just transferred him to the climate, that blighted him once and for ever.
The Howard Hughes thing hadn’t actually sounded like such a bad deal until about...oh, eight thirty-five this morning. Something about having his ex carry him to the bathroom and help him wash his balls just took all the fun out of becoming an ecce...
Elijah blinked in dazzling sunlight and took a deep breath. The sweet-pepper scent of meadow grass told him immediately where he was. Winded, he skidded to a halt as the portal spat him out. Above him stretched skies of cornflower blue, dotted with t...
Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstances might force you to live in this environmen...
I don't want to lose you.' His voice almost a whisper. Seeing his haggard expression, she took his hand and squeezed it, then reluctantly let it go. She could feel the tears again, and she fought them back. 'But you don't want to keep me, either, do ...
The first time I tongue you into coming, it’s going to be an apology. The second time will be a reward for waiting.” He fell to his knees and took his first intoxicating taste of Lucy. A growl worked its way free of his chest. “The third time i...
This white guy’s probably all defensive because the black guy accused him of being the killer. But come on, the white guy’s obviously not the killer, because only one murder took place. Now, if there were multiple victims, my money would be on wh...