We were women in transition, raised in one era and coming of age in another, very different time...here we were, entering the workplace in the 1960s questioning--and often rejecting--many of the values we had been taught. We were the polite, perfecti...
It makes Brooke feel strange in her stomach. It is like the feeling when she reads a book like the one about the man with the bomb, or thinks a sentence, just any old sentence like: the girl ran across the park, and unless you add the describing word...
Used to be he was my heart's desire. His forthright gaze, his expert hands: I'd lie on the couch with my eyes closed just thinking about it. Never about the fact that everything changes, that even this, my best passion, would not be immune. No, I wou...
I didn't think she was that kind of girl." I scampered up onto the ledge and strained to listen. "I overheard two of my students talking about her in homeroom yesterday. I never would have thought Natalie would do something like that. Then again, she...
On my bedside table is a snow globe with a winterscape inside. Church, park bench, girl standing shin-deep in snow. Tip the snow globe over and a blizzard of slow snow falls over church and bench and girl. What is it about snow globes that makes them...
Patrick: You know that girl we did last week? The one with the potatoes. Stan: That girl? Yeah, that's this guy's girl. Patrick: Yeah. Stan: Right... Was. Took care of that. Patrick: Well uh, I kind of fell in love with her that night. Stan: What? Yo...
Whatever criticism we may have for Jonah, at least it can be said that Jonah was consistent. This legalistic, over-judgmental, young prophet will consistently proscribe the most severe form of punishment for the guilty--even when the guilty party is ...
His life was focused on each single day. For him each night meant a void, a grave, extinction. The capacity to lay oneself down to die at the end of every day, without thinking anything of it, was something he had not yet acquired.
Sir, I cannot sing. I have no formal training. I do not read music. And I know this is a church - but I play a mean harmonica.
The purpose of school is for children to learn, not for them to feel good about themselves all the time.
The destructive effects of video games are not on boys' cognitive abilities or their reaction times, but on their motivation and their connectedness with the real world.
If young men and young women are brought up to consider frugality contemptible, and industry degrading, it is vain to expect they will at once become prudent and useful, when the cares of life press heavily upon them.
He’s a young man, my own age or a little older, which is young for a man although not for a woman, as at my age a woman is an old maid but a man is not an old bachelor until he’s fifty, and even then there’s still hope for the ladies, as Mary W...
If a solution fails to appear ... and yet we feel success is just around the corner, try resting for a while. ... Like the early morning frost, this intellectual refreshment withers the parasitic and nasty vegetation that smothers the good seed. Burs...
[...]No book can be really complete in this life; it has to end where the author's time and understanding end. There is always something left unsaid. I look forward to the life to come as the unending last chapter of all the good books I have ever re...
Hi! handsome hunting man Fire your little gun. Bang! Now the animal is dead and dumb and done. Nevermore to peep again, creep again, leap again, Eat or sleep or drink again. Oh, what fun!
It (politician) wants to separate them. And to do so it has chosen the worst, blackest pencil of all - the pencil of war, which spells only misery and death.
Unni will come, if not today, then tomorrow. Today is nearly gone, but other todays stir fecund in the word tomorrow, many other todays when this one has lapsed from existence. And because I think of Unni, invoking his name in this for ever recurrent...
... all humans are frightened of their own solitude. Yet only in solitude can man learn to know himself, learn to handle his own eternity of aloneness. And love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and prote...
To Mr. Blot, who went through life an unconscious example of the raison d'être of the British Empire, a shipwreck was merely one of the many things to be ignored. His was a calming influence.
How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act,...
