Extended family is great. If you want to know how extended your family is, just go out and win the lottery. Your phone will be ringing nonstop. And you know I'll call you too, because I'm your fifth cousin on your father's side.
The young gentlemen who came calling seemed especially puzzling. They sat in their velvet shirts and their leather boots, nibbling burnt cakes and praising Diamond's mind, and all the while their eyes said other things. their eyes said. Then: 'You ar...
There’s only one Earth, and it’s tiny, but evil human leaders avoid problems they don’t want to resolve by giving them names which make the problems sound like they’re taking place in a different world: they make people not care about other p...
She wore tight corsets to give her a teeny waist - I helped her lace them up - but they had the effect of causing her to faint. Mom called it the vapors and said it was a sign of her high breeding and delicate nature. I thought it was a sign that the...
In the hero stories, the call to go on a journey takes the form of a loss, an error, a wound, an unexplainable longing, or a sense of a mission. When any of these happens to us, we are being summoned to make a transition. It will always mean leaving ...
A castaway in the sea was going down for the third time when he caught sight of a passing ship. Gathering his last strength, he waved frantically and called for help. Someone on board peered at him scornfully and shouted back, "Get a boat!
...[W]hen I told my dad why I was calling, he just said, 'Honey, you're so beautiful it doesn't matter what you wear.' I wondered how many dads in America were, at that very moment, giving their daughters the same useless advice mine was giving me.
One can see [...] that the so-called governing powers are cardboard characters that mask the true ruling factors of our culture. Of course, those who manipulate the nation are not stupid. Rulers throughout history are only as powerful as the people w...
With a new found confidence, Briston comes alive. "Then we have to do something. We need to call the police, or the swat team, maybe the military." "Yeah, and why we're at it, why don't we send a prayer up to Heaven and tell the other angels to go ah...
He used to call vampires "the breathing ghosts"- for, as he put it, we existed in a kind of limbo-land between the living and the dead. We breathed, but we were not alive. We flitted through the air, but we still left foot prints on the ground. We we...
Ephemerals: That's what Hub called them; flowers that bloomed and died in a matter of weeks, before the trees leafed out and shaded them. She liked the way the word sounded in her head. I am an ephemeral. It made her feel like something passing and p...
Since the so-called Age of Enlightenment, our shaky anthropocentric, rationalist egos have been brainwashed to forget what 'primitive' cultures once understood: Animals can be manifestations of celestial beings in disguise; they possess supernatural ...
Alice’s razor-thin blond hair is what people in Santo Domingo call bueno, but I don’t understand how that kind of hair can be good. It doesn’t move at all, or ripple like the water in Boca Chica when I throw shells at it.
With still, underneath, the old respectable-girl-versus-slut thing. It’s OK to fuck around if you’re a feminist but it’s also not OK to fuck around because most guys aren’t feminists and won’t respect you and won’t call you again if you f...
He was in awe of the thirst that people had for someone to tell them that everything was going to be all right. He marveled at the gullibility and vulnerability of his fellow humans. No wonder the churches called them sheep. They were woolly-headed p...
The self-congratulatory popular account insists that Dr. King called on the nation to fully accept its own creed, and the walls came a-tumbling down. This conventional narrative is soothing, moving, and politically acceptable, and has only the disadv...
Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural, selection, but from the flower’s point of view, this is a distinction without a difference: individual plants in which a trait desired by either bees or Turks occurred wound up with mo...
He looks kind, but he's really a huge sex fiend. He's perverted and spoiled and always jealous. And he hasn't called me for two weeks. But he's cool, isn't he? My guy. I'm the only one that knows...that the coolest part of him is his naked back.
Come senators, congressmen Please heed the call Don't stand in the doorway Don't block up the hall For he that gets hurt Will be he who has stalled There's a battle outside ragin'. It'll soon shake your windows And rattle your walls For the times the...
The whole world is a theatre for the display of the divine goodness, wisdom, justice, and power, but the Church is the orchestra, as it were—the most conspicuous part of it; and the nearer the approaches are that God makes to us, the more intimate ...
The blood of Heaven binds you," said the Queen. "Blood calls to blood, under the skin. But love and blood are not the same." "Riddles," Clary said angrily. "Do you even mean anything when you talk like that?" "He is bound to you," said the Queen. "Bu...