My life is ungrateful to me. I do so much for it to be comfortable, and still, it repays me by throwing tantrums left and right. As soon as I think it's time for a present due to all my efforts, I get repaid with ingratitude. If this is how my life t...
Happiness is the most natural thing in the world when you have it, and the slowest, strangest, most impossible thing when you don't. It's like learning a foreign language: You can think about the words all you want, but you'll never be able to speak ...
[...] students should be told that an effort is always required, when you start to read a serious author, to overcome mental laziness and reluctance, because you are about to enter the mind of someone who thinks differently from yourself. And that is...
The distinction between natural and supernatural, in fact, broke down; and when it had done so, the burden of intolerable strangeness which this universe imposes on us by dividing it into two halves and encouraging the mind never to think of both in ...
You're better off believing in God they'd warn you, just in case. Because you'd hate to arrive at the gates of heaven a nonbeliever and find out the Christians had been right all along. It was a pretty ingenious line of thinking. It almost made me wa...
Kodachrome... it gives us those nice, bright colors, gives us the greens of summers, makes ya think all the world's a sunny day, Oh yeah! I've got a Nikon camera, I'd love to take a photograph, so mama don't take... my Kodachrome away...
How bad do you want cancer? Bad enough to eat a rainbow of it? Personally, I think the red cancer would be the worst, but anything you swallow with artificial hues in it is going to pop a tumor out of your body the day after you eat it.
Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will," she says. The sky is like a monochromatic contemporary painting, drawing me in with its illusion of depth, pulling me up. "Yeah, that's true," I say. But then after I think about it for a second, I add,...
If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're going to find them.
I think that if I ever have kids, and they are upset, I won't tell them that people are starving in China or anything like that because it wouldn't change the fact that they were upset. And even if somebody else has it much worse, that doesn't really...
And I thought that all those little kids are going to grow up someday. And all of those little kids are going to do the things that we do. And they will all kiss someone someday. But for now, sledding is enough. I think it would be great if sledding ...
Are you telling me in your own gentle way to stop whining?" "Yes." "I don't feel like a hero. I feel like an idiot." "I think heroes generally do, but those men believe in you." "I did wait until I was outside before I threw up.
For just a second, Lauren wonders if she’s going insane. But insane people don’t think they’re insane, everybody knows that. But...since that fact of insanity is common knowledge, doesn’t that mean an insane person could use it to convince th...
P—Jamie!” I called. He waded back toward me. “I’m starting to think my name is Pajamie.” “Your name should be Pajerky. You said it wasn’t deep.” “Pajerky?” He gave me a skeptical look. “That’s Pathetic.” “We’ll see how s...
I do not think I responded immediately, for it took me a moment or two to fully digest these words of Miss Kenton. Moreover, as you might appreciate, their implications were such as to provoke a certain degree of sorrow within me. Indeed- why should ...
What could I offer the local bad boy except my livelihood? Oh, I know. My body or my planes! Why didn't I think of that? Would you have preferred that I offer him my body, Nic, because I sure as hell wasn't going to sign over either of my planes!
Rosencrantz: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat? Guildenstern: No, no, no... Death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat. Rosencrantz: I've...
It’s so peaceful. I could go to sleep in here.” His eyes flickered to me once more, and for a dizzying second I wasn’t thinking about sleep or storms but about pressing my lips to his. I gave my head a slight shake and tried to slow my pulse
Sometimes people think they know you. They know a few facts about you, and they piece you together in a way that makes sense to them. And if you don't know yourself very well, you might even believe that they are right. But the truth is, that isn't y...
Eyes narrowed, Judd stared at the structure as if at a mortal enemy. Slapping his fellow lieutenant on the shoulder, Riaz said, "Don't even think about it." A pissed-off telekinetic versus the complex metal pylons and tubes of the jungle gym- the res...
Helen Keller became deaf, dumb, and blind shortly after birth. Despite her greatest misfortune, she has written her name indelibly in the pages of the history of the great. Her entire life has served as evidence that no one is ever defeated until def...
