Mallory dropped her head to the steering wheel. “Look, I’m mad at you, okay? This isn’t about me. I know my painful memories are relative. My life is good. I’m lucky. This isn’t about how...

We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages. We’re English, and the English are best at everything.

There is a blue bird in my heart that wants to get out.

I hate these affairs”, he’d told her once, tearing up an engraved invitation to an exclusive charity ball. “They’re the worst kind of discrimination. An invitation doesn’t really mean that you’re invited; it means that...

I guess you have to born in the Pit to find light where there isn’t any.

You might, without my crediting it, fall deeply in love and forever, with some warped hunchback whelped in the gutter. I should equally stop you from taking him.

Someday you will die. Because you are embodied through and through, at that point you will cease to exist. You will not meet death, because, as the sage says, “Where death is I am not;...

I’m not sure. But there’s something about the darkness, the stillness of this hour, I think, that creates a language of its own. There’s a strange kind of freedom in the dark; a terrifying vulnerability...

For it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart...

They’ve never known a time when people drank rain water because it was pure, or could eat snow, or swim in any river or brook. The last time I drove to Washington the traffic was...

Come, sir, come,I’ll wrestle with you in my strength of love.Look, here I have you, thus I let you go,And give you to the gods.

Ah, yeah. Yeah, tis awful all right. Well, your Mam wanted me to talk to you about it, but…’He stopped; he didn’t know what else to say.‘Yeah? Ah, I know the score, Dad. She wants...

We are two and more than two,” he whispered in her ear, and then he lifted her and carried her to the bed.

The people they had been last summer, the person she had been–Dicey guessed she’d never be afraid again, not the way she had been all summer. She had taken care of them all, sometimes well,...

…you realize that you don’t understand yourself any better than you understand anyone else.

My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain…There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor, but that...

We all have the best laid plans for our children, and they go and ruin it all by growing up any way they want to. What the hell was it all for, then? (Real Life...

Will I begin it? said Doyler laughing. That’s all that’s in it, he laughing said.Oh sure that grin. Oh sure that wonderful saucerful grin. Jim sat on the grass and he plucked at the blades....

So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days, you can hear their chorus rushing past:...

Alison’s grandfather told her,’To err is human, to forgive divine

I watch with envious eyes and mind, the single-souled who dare not feelThe wind that blows beyond the moon, who do not hear the fairy reel

She knows there are traps everywhere that can make her cry, she knows the way she dies a little every time someone asks her for change and she doesn’t give it to them means that...

Seulement la terre qui obéit,sait bien qu’elle tourne en rond,tandis que nous vers l’infininous précipitons.Translation:But the obedient Earth well knowsthat she moves round and round,whereas we hurtle downtoward infinity.

There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.

This here is your inheritance, says the senior partner. Yes, he says, Ludwig, I know, and stows the plan for the bathing house (5.5m long, 3.8m wide, outer wall construction: wood, roof construction: thatch), stows...

She was too busy feeling grief to dress like grief.

Later in life, I learnt that many things one may require have to be weighed against one’s dignity, which can be an insuperable barrier against advancement in almost any direction. However, in those days, choice...