Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, revel the history buried in sounds. They haven't forgotten that words can be more than signs, that words have magic, the power to be things, to point to themselves and materialize. With their back-...
Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person wh...
Deciding we won't drive to that chain grocery store and buy that imported pineapple is a path to liberation. Deciding to walk to the farmers' market and buy fresh, local peas is like spitting in the eye of the industries that control us. Every act of...
I had wanted to hate you that day. Believe me, I had. And then suddenly, staring at me incredulously, your extra half-tooth had blurted out aloud, ‘You get dimples on both cheeks!’ your immaculate lisp intact, on both the ‘s’es. I remember th...
Shut up…let me tell you, LET ME. Every time I look at your face or even remember it, it wrecks me. And the way you are with me and you’re just fun and you shit all over me and you make fun of me and you’re real. I don’t have enough time in an...
What if love and reality are big things, so big that we can only ever see a tiny bit and we think we’re seeing the whole thing, but the whole thing is so vast that there is no way from our small place in the universe to see it all? What about that?...
AGE DIFFERENCE What if I told you that one day you will meet a girl who is unlike anyone else you've known. She will know all the right things to say, what makes you laugh, what turns you on, what drives you wild and best of all, you will do for her ...
and have discovered a new type of nuclear reaction, the splitting into two smaller nuclei of the nuclei of uranium and thorium under neutron bombardment. Thus they demonstrated the production of nuclei of barium, lanthanum, strontium, yttrium, and, m...
Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into one’s life with pomp and blare, like a gay knight riding down; perhaps it crept to one’s side like an old friend through quiet ways; perhaps it revealed itself in seeming prose, until some sudden shaf...
Her rage flopped awkwardly away like a duck. She felt as she had when her cold, fierce parents had at last grown sick and old, stick-boned and saggy, protected by infirmity the way cuteness protected a baby, or should, it should protect a baby, and s...
I have to admit that I'm up to my neck in frivolity, buried in dresses to the point of ruin! Fifteen different garments! My wardrobe jam-packed! My girl, this is not the way for an old woman to behave - particularly since you never wear anything but ...
I recognized the great monument from the illustration in the copy of /The Jungle Book/ that my mother kept in the top drawer of my bedside table. When I went with Sophia to the Taj Mahal for the first time, I was not as enchanted by the real mausoleu...
If you drop assumptions, and can anticipate the possibilities, you can master the art of strategy. However, if you can only manipulate probability, you can only create a path to victory. But remember, plans can break down. The future is always a step...
I love the sound of words, the feel of them, the flow of them. I love the challenge of finding just that perfect combination of words to describe a curl of the lip, a tilt of the chin, a change in the atmosphere. Done well, novel-writing can combine ...
There were people who went to sleep last night, poor and rich and white and black, but they will never wake again. And those dead folks would give anything at all for just five minutes of this weather or ten minutes of plowing. So you watch yourself ...
We're fighting for unhappiness?" Noah asked skeptically. "It sounds a bit crazy when you put it that way." Nijinsky laughed, delighted. "Oh, it is." Then, serious again, he said, "We fight for the right to be what we choose,to feel what we choose. Ev...
When the flames of life are gnawing away at your butt, run faster, quicker, and harder than you've ever run before, because I guarantee it that life will condition you, harder than any trainer ever will. When you state to yourself with the utter most...
Elsie's shop was a treasure chest, where green wellies and waxed jackets originated way before Hunter and Barbour became household names. If she did not have what you wanted, dearie, she would go up to her vast attic, root around and come down to ann...
We, and I think I'm speaking for many writers, don't know what it is that sometimes comes to make our books alive. All we can do is write dutifully and day after day, every day, giving our work the very best of what we are capable. I don't that we ca...
What out-of-the-way cause graze me grazed a lot, Undo me loose from the genuine ties of my destiny, What greater sin than a man’s blasphemy? If any to consume my inward person like the vile when hades burn still, If I know me well and I’m without...
The first step is the hardest in every journey of dreams. So If you have had the tenacity to begin then we are confident that the hardest part of your mission is the one lying behind you. Step into the future, knowing that God has got you this far as...
