Not to be too dramatic about it, that night I slept the sleep of the damned. I dreamt of turrets and craggy ledges where the windswept rain blew in from the ocean with the odor of violets. A pale woma...
When you're that age, you sometimes have a great enthusiasm that is very deep and very narrow, and that is something that has always intrigued me-- that world of the eleven-year-old that is so quickly...
How very kind of her, ' I said. 'I must remember to send her a card.'I'd send her a card alright. It would be the Ace of Spades, and I'd mail it anonymously from somewhere other than Bishop's Lacey.
Seed biscuits and milk! I hated Mrs. Mullet's seed biscuits the way Saint Paul hated sin. Perhaps even more so. I wanted to clamber up onto the table, and with a sausage on the end of a fork as my sce...
I want to know who I am before it is too late—before I am no longer the same person—before I become someone different. Although there are days when this seems a furious race against time, there are ot...
Do What?' 'Lie,' he said. 'Why do you fabricate these outlandish stories?''Well,' I wanted to say, 'there are those of us who create because all around us, things visible and invisible are crumbling....
Give Nature a vacuum and she will try to fill it. Give her localized pressure and she will try to disperse it. She is forever seeking a balance she can never achieve, never happy with what she's got.
True charity, I had had discovered, consists of swallowing an invisible flaming sword.
Giving someone the benefit of the doubt is not so simple as it sounds. What it means, in fact, is being charitable--which, as the vicar is fond of pointing out, is the most difficult of the graces to...
We always want to love the recipients of our charity," the doctor said, negotiating a sharp bend in the road with a surprising demonstration of steering skill, "but it is not necessary. Indeed, it is...
...I found my eyes repelled by hers as if they were the like poles of a pair of magnets.
It was a lie and I detected it at once. As an accomplished fibber myself, I spotted the telltale signs of an untruth before they were halfway out of his mouth: the excessive detail, the offhand delive...
Not very good with death? Father was a military man, and military men lived with death; lived for death; lived on death. To a professional soldier, oddly enough, death was life.
I felt a pang -- a strange and inexplicable pang that I had never felt before. It was homesickness. Now, even more than I had earlier when I'd first glimpsed it, I longed to be transported into that q...
I could tell he was becoming sulky, as boys and men do when they're caught bluffing. And I ignored him, as girls and women do when they catch them out.
One of the things I dread about becoming an adult is that sooner or later you begin letting sentimentality get in the way of simple logic. False feelings are allowed to clog the works like raw honey p...
Although it is pleasant to think about poison at any season, there is something special about Christmas, and I found myself grinning.
A dead body is much more fascinating than a live one, and I have learned that most corpses tell better stories.
The place smelled of commodes and playing cards, and before I was halfway to the end I had made a firm resolve never to begin to die. For me it would be all or nothing: no half measures, no lingering...
I had found by experience that putting things down on paper helped to clear the mind in precisely the same way, as Mrs. Mullet had taught me, that an eggshell clarifies the consommé or the coffee, whi...
