I always hated it when TV reporters stuck a microphone in the faces of people who'd just lost a home or a loved one, wanting to know how they felt. They felt like shit. They hurt, and they didn't know how they were going to get through the night. The...
Damn," Crystal sputtered, looking up from the dictionary in disbelief. "Oenophlygia: the state of being dunk. It really is a word". Johnny gloated unabashedly. "Just wouldn't listen, would you? Just couldn't stand that I might be way ahead of the gam...
What do you do,' said Jean, 'with, ah, "ungifted" children when you have them?' 'Cherish them and raise them, you imbecile. Most of them end up working for us, in Karthain and elsewhere. What did you think we'd do, burn them on a pyre?' 'Forget I ask...
The feeling, for those seconds, is glorious—it reminds him that he is human, that he is so insignificant as to be utterly free, and he is being guided along gracefully, lovingly, by the hand of Nature—and it frees him, however transiently, from a...
I was thinking of murder, mutilation and dessert like Ignacia Sandoval’s instructions for delectable empanadas made of minced mother-in-law’s tongue (said to induce peace and harmony in your household), or the gonads of your cheating husband (a s...
If Stuart is a freak... it is because he has had the superhuman strength not to be defeated by this isolation. It is because he has had the almost unbelievable social adroitness to be able to fit in smoothly with an educated, soft-skinned person like...
I didn’t want the person standing there, beside the bed, to have the same face I’d found so attractive at the airport. But you were there all right: the blue eyes, blondish hair, and tiny scar. Only you didn’t look beautiful this time. Just evi...
Will laughed. 'I now know why fate linked you with Xav. You are going to tease each other unmercifully.' Victorthrew down a card. 'Might make the world a little safer for the rest of us then.' 'Unless they turn their powers jointly on us,' suggested ...
I learned a lot that night—like how incredibly mind blowing ho-hos and wine coolers were together, how that you could discover the answers to life’s most difficult questions by watching Buffy, but most of all, that no matter what was going on in ...
Names. What’s in a name, really? I mean, besides a bunch of letters or sounds strung together to make a word. Does a rose by any other name really smell as sweet? Would the most famous love story in the world be as poignant if it was called Romeo a...
I mean, that star over there is blinking at me madly now, but for how long? An hour or two, or for the next million years? And how long will we sit here like this? Just another moment, or the rest of our lives? You know which one I'd prefer...
once ruffle-skirted vanity table where I primped at thirteen, opening drawers to a private chaos of eyeshadows lavender teal sky-blue, swarms of hair pins pony tail fasteners, stashes of powders, colonies of tiny lipsticks (p.39)
Four of us,' said Morwen. The cats yowled. 'Yes, I know, and of course you're coming, but you can't carry a bucket of soapy water, so for the purposes of this discussion it doesn't matter,' she told them. The cats gave her an affronted look, turned t...
You broke the Man Code, dude. 'No man shall knowingly and with malice aforethought kick another man in the nuts.'" "Okay, so I kicked him in the nuts. The little fucker was fleeing the scene of a crime where he'd pointed a weapon at my buddies." [fro...
Statues are too much like dolls, and dolls are creepy. You keep expecting them to blink. And the ones that smile, like this?" Eve kept her lips tight together and she curved them up. "You know they've got teeth in there. Big, sharp, shiny teeth." I d...
He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure ...
Because just as all political and historical change sooner or later disappoints, so does adulthood. So does life. Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, tha...
I blushed. You haven't seen a bald man in his sixties blush? Oh, it happens, just as it does to a hairy, spotty fifteen-year-old. And because it's rarer, it sends the blusher tumbling back to that time when life felt like nothing more than one long s...
How, then, does the written word work? What part of a reader absorbs it - or should that be a double question: what part of a reader absorbs what part of a text? I think that underneath, or alongside, a reader's conscious response to a text, whatever...
Then all was quiet, except for that murmurous half telling, half withholding of tremendous secrets that the sea would keep up all night. Each little wave seemed to say, “I’ll tell you-” and then pull back with a smothered “Oh!” to be follow...
Mister didn't come with me on cases, being above such trivial matters, but he found me pleasant company when I was at home and not moving around too much, except when he didn't, in which case he went rambling
