Emily woke to shadows and their voices. They looked different today, because the entire world hurt. The numbness had worn off sometime between sleep and awake, and she was seeing red. The shadows on the walls were not shadows at all, but red blobs co...
Words were few and failing between them as though the silence that sat with them had laid its old lips on theirs and sucked them dry of speech. For where could one begin? With the weather? But here there was no weather. These few sad rooms were the o...
Hidden Highlands was maybe a little richer but not that different from many of the other small, wealthy and scared enclaves nestled in the hills and valleys around Los Angeles. Walls and gates, guardhouses and private security forces were the secret ...
The clandestine operation tucked several floors below ground level inside a Los Angeles high-rise had never before made her queasy. Today the copper walls, marble flooring, refrigerated temperature and minimal furnishings took discomfort to a new lev...
I'm watching her talk. Watching her jaw move and collecting her words one by one as they spill from her lips. I don't deserve them. Her warm memories. I'd like to paint them over the bare plaster walls of my soul, but everything I paint seems to peel...
I just bought a can of brown paint. It’s more expensive than coffee, but I really hit the wall after I chug it.
I was the outsider in Fernhall House, but they were all outsiders really. Outside society. Outside time. You hear people say that those in asylums and care facilities are out of their minds. But in truth their minds are often the one thing they are o...
I didn't like Dali: now, like you, I do. Like you, I began to drink my Coke with a pinch of salt . Like you, I stopped bothering about ironed clothes. Like you, I sit with a dictionary while reading the papers. Like you, I sit on the compound wall af...
They lied, you know,” said Cpl. Allan Richmond. He hugged the wall next to Owens. Beside him, PFC Bucky Hatton crouched low, a Browning 1911 semiautomatic gripped tightly in his hand. “Who?” asked Bart, glad to be out of the wind and rain, even...
Art is what we call...the thing an artist does. It's not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of dou...
When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "One word at a time," and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. Th...
He suddenly felt the urge to kiss her-hard- upon the mouth. But this- what he felt, it could never be real. Because once the ball was over, she would go back to being an assassin, and he would still be a prince. Dorian swallowed hard. For tonight, th...
So weird,” Decker mumbled. “I thought she walked through walls.”“I guess she doesn't have to. This is how she kept getting my porno stash last summer,”Beck grumbled. “I had it behind lock and key.”“Our porno stash. I told you to give ...
Sophie(female): This life is not worth living without the people that make us want to tear down those walls. The thrill of vulnerability the danger of opening your heart. It makes us feel alive. Parker(female): I feel alive when I'm jumping down a bu...
We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, woul...
To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That's what Norman Mailer did. That's what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that...
When a person thinks you are too good for them, they create a wall without even taking a chance. The best life that God has in store for a person is often thrown away because of what he or she thinks they deserve. True love is not the life you had, b...
In all the difficult decisions that I made through the course of running Loudcloud and Opsware, I never once felt brave. In fact, I often felt scared to death. I never lost those feelings, but after much practice, I learned to ignore them. That learn...
Architects design buildings; that's what we do, so we have to go with the flow; and, even though I'm still an old Leftie, global capitalism does have its good side. It's broken down barriers - the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union - it's raised a lot of ...
My father was famous for his photographic memory. He was in the OSS. They trained him to be captured on purpose and to read upside down and backwards and commit to memory every document in Germany he saw as he was being interrogated - every schedule ...
I think the most successful are the most paranoid. The first thing people do when they buy a mansion is they build the biggest wall you could possibly build around it. What happens is, now you become a target. If I go into the hood, I'm at a disadvan...
