Kevin", his father began, "I've been thinking about it – I guess I was kind of carried away. It's just that I've waited so long for my old school to make it to the Regionals... I suppose I was living it vicariously through you. Keith says you're no...
Raffin appeared again, a floor above her, on the balconied passageway that ran past his workrooms. He leaned over the railing and called down to her. "Kat!" "What is it?" "You look lost . Have you forgotten the way to your rooms?" "I'm stalling." "Ho...
Apparently, we're all in the frame," I heard Harry murmur somewhere behind me. And I whirled back to him. Innate, irrational anger surged. Then stopped, dead - as I suddenly took in Handsome, Robert and Doc. They were all staring at me. They were con...
He had heard about talking to plants in the early seventies, on Radio Four, and thought it was an excellent idea. Although talking is perhaps the wrong word for what Crowley did. What he did was put the fear of God into them. More precisely, the fear...
Growing up feels like your skin no longer fits. Like you just want to crawl out of that thinly stretched space and lay down in the grass and sob for hours. Instead, I am in a cafe eating lunch and trying not to scream. Looking around wondering if any...
Love is not first a feeling. Though the feelings come later and grow thick in the basic loam of love, they don't constitute the sum and substance of love. Love is doing whatever good God says you must do for another, to please God, whether (at first)...
There is a certain kind of man who is forever searching. He wanders from place to place, he looks hard into the eyes of women and men in every town, maybe he scratches the earth or wields a gun, remedies illnesses or writes books, and there is always...
I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there, in prison, that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mental...
Percy, you are dismissed from my service." "Me? Why, my lord?" "Why? Because, Percy, far from being a fit consort for a prince of the realm, you would bore the leggings off a village idiot. You ride a horse rather less well than another horse would. ...
Young people," McDonald said contemptuously. "You always think there's something to find out." "Yes, sir," Andrews said. "Well, there's nothing," McDonald said. "You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier l...
When Hitler marched across the Rhine To take the land of France, La dame de fer decided, ‘Let’s make the tyrant dance.’ Let him take the land and city, The hills and every flower, One thing he will never have, The elegant Eiffel Tower. The Fren...
A smile is hidden beneath the mustache, it crinkles the corners of his hooded eyes. “I didn’t. I have other business in town and I told my friend I would attend to the matter of his son, as he could not do so himself.” “Very kind of you.” �...
We live in a drug culture! Drugs are everywhere and touted as the panacea for every ailment in our society. We have drugs for hyper children, drugs for depression—some of the most insidious drugs ever—, drugs for allergies, drugs for acne, drugs ...
I know how much you grieve over those who are under your care: those you try to help and fail, those you cannot help. Have faith in God and remember that He will is His own way and in His own time complete what we so poorly attempt. Often we do not a...
Get married, my friend, you don't know what it means to live alone, at my age. Nowadays feeling alone fills me with appalling anguish; being alone at home, by the fire, in the evening. It seems to me then that I'm alone on the earth, dreadfully alone...
All good writers write [terrible first drafts.] This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. . . I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of ...
Do you need help with anything?" he asked with a wicked arched brow. "Maybe with cookies for Santa." Scowling because no one was here but us, I said, "You're a bit late for that. Santa already came." He hadn't moved, but I knew better than to think h...
Oh little Poupchette, some may tell you that you are nobody's child, a child of defilement, a child begotten in fear and horror. Some may tell you that you are a child of abomination conceived in abomination, a tainted child, a child polluted long be...
She wasn’t afraid of difficulties; what frightened her was being forced to choose one particular path. Choosing a path meant having to miss out on others. She had a whole life to live and she was always thinking that, in future, she might regret th...
Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell,' Holly advised him. 'That was Doc's mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can't give your heart to a wild thing: the...
The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate wi...
