You off then, Da?” she asked. “Aye. Too old for all this killing.” And to prove that, her father turned and brought his axe down on the head of a traitor that had gotten too close. Spun once more and cut off the legs of another. He faced them a...
I shut my eyes, turned away for a moment, and it came: a shiver of finality like the one when you decide, in your own mind, that you’re going to have to tell someone who loves you that you don’t want to be with them anymore. Terror, and relief; r...
There is the world you know, the world you have always known; and then you blink, and there is a place you never had any inkling of, and it spreads out across your eyescape. And then, most shockingly of all: there is the realization that these two pl...
But why was the room suddenly becoming so dark? It was the middle of the afternoon. With a supreme effort Giuseppe Corte, who felt himself paralyzed with a strange lethargy, looked at the clock on the nightstand beside the bed. It was 3:30. He turned...
So many people are so terrified to be alone that they settle for a loveless relationship or stay trapped in a miserable one for months and even years on end. But as it turns out, alone means unique, unequaled, and unexcelled. Or in other words: Unpar...
Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky-mauve evenings of late autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart. The sun departs the sky in winding sheets of gaudy cloud; anguish enters the city, a sense of the bitterest regret, a nostalgia for things we never kn...
They turned to Angel. "We will call you Little One," the leader said, obviously deciding to dispense with the whole confusing name thing. "Okay," said Angel agreeably. "I'll call you Guy in a White Lab Coat." He frowned. "That can be his Indian name,...
That was how it was, sometimes. You put yourself in front of the thing and waited for whatever was going to happen and that was all. It scared you and it didn't matter. You stood and faced it. There was no outwitting anything. When Almondine had been...
Have you ever asked yourself, where do Evil come from? No? But many ask the question, and I’ll tell you where there is Evil. Not in Darkness, as many believe, but in Garbling. Garbling turns Light into Darkness, and Darkness into Light. Either is p...
Grief was like a terrible burden, but at least you could lay it down by the side of the road and walk away from it. Antonia had come only a few paces, but already she could turn and look back and not weep. It wasn't anything to do with forgetting. It...
I am running after you, and life, in desperate pursuit. My dream is that someday you will both turn and let me catch you. That dream carries me through every night... I have enclosed a hundred kisses in this letter. You must count them out carefully ...
I'd never felt so helpless - so hopeless - in my life as I did there. To be completely under someone's power, with no one to turn to for help, to make someone feel like they're at fault for you hurting them . . . I realized that was exactly what I'd ...
Time can do all sorts of things. It’s almost like a magician. It can turn autumn into spring and babies into children, seeds into flowers and tadpoles into frogs, caterpillars into cocoons, and cocoons into butterflies. And life into death. There�...
You can’t turn love on and off like a light switch, no matter how hard you try. All you can do is wall it off, one brick at a time, until you’ve created an impenetrable fortress around your emotions. And once that fortress is built, you camouflag...
That could also be because at one point during the film, our hands found each other. And when I felt Michael's middle finger caress the inside of my palm, it sent a tickle up my spine, and the fingers of my right hand were soon exploring his left han...
Oh, but I was an idiot. Wanting to be whatever magic she waited for, when I had no magic - only darkness or death to give. But it seemed in that one instant, when she turned to discover what was behind her, that I could have brought happiness to at l...
With a laugh exposing a kissable mouth and perfect teeth, he glances my way again, his entire demeanor tensing for a second, those dark eyes finally promising more. They haven't just licked me, they've broken my legs, turned my hips inside out, and s...
Though I loved the wired world, the new-wave librarians, the avatars and activists, I turned into a dinosaur in that library. I couldn’t help it; I was an old-fashioned writer who loved the ancient books summoned via pneumatic tubes, the archives, ...
He turned to Edwin. "You know, the stuff you just told me makes more sense than all the weird things the counselors and psychologist have told me in school and at the detention center." Edwin tapped Cole's shoulder with the broken stick. "That's beca...
. I felt the sun graze my face as I sped further and further from it all. The only negative part about running was that at some point I knew I’d have to stop. I’d have to turn around and go back. And whatever troubles had haunted me when I left, ...
Could an Olympian parent turn against his half-blood child? Would it sometimes be easier just to let them die? If there were ever any half-bloods who needed to worry about that, it was Thalia and me. I wondered if maybe I should've sent Poseidon that...