One has not lived until one has carried a sixty-pound dog down a sweeping flight of stairs at half-past V in the morning.
Nothing in all those O swan poems had ever mentioned that they hissed. Or resented being mistaken for felines. Or bit.
I was on a walking tour of Oxford colleges once with a group of bored and unimpressable tourists. They yawned at Balliol's quad, T.E. Lawrence's and Churchill's portraits, and the blackboard Einstein...
When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your le...
We weren’t even a halfway decent detectin’ team. We hadn’t solved the case. The case had been solved in spite of us. Worse, we had been such an impediment, we’d had to be packed off out of the way bef...
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but an elopement.
She watched him a while longer and then shut her eyes again. And even though she knew her hand was tucked beneath her cheek and he was on the far side of the room, the instant she closed her eyes he w...
Nothing can save you, not youth or beauty or wealth, not intelligence or power or courage. You are all alone, in the middle of the ocean, with the lights going out.
It is a temporal universal that people never appreciate their own time, especially transportation. Twentieth-Century contemps complained about cancelled flights and gasoline prices, Eighteenth-Century...
I was flying out to Connecticut for the express purpose of breaking up with my boyfriend and I bought this set of three paperbacks to read on the plane and by the time I got to New Haven I was so worr...
I picked out F. Scott Fitzgerald's Bernice Bobs Her Hair and a couple of mysteries, which always have simple, solvable problems like How did the murderer get into the locked room? instead of hard ones...
Are you making something up in your head, miss? —FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT, A Little Princess Zener
What the hell is ‘emotional bonding,’ anyway? It sounds like something out of Fifty Shades of Grey.
You can’t go back, Gilchrist said. Haven’t you heard? We’re under quarantine, thanks to Mr. Dunworthy’s carelessness.
Which one's in the main theater?I don't know. I just work here part-time to pay for my organic breathing lessons.Do you have any dice? I asked, and then realized I was going about this all wrong. This...
Well, at least she’s asserting herself, and you don’t have to worry about her having ‘squelched girl syndrome,’ she said. Mary Clare ignored that.
There are a hundred ways a man can bleed to death. And he can be pulled from the rubble of bitterness, of despair, as well as the wreckage of the Phoenix. And which rescue is the more real? Nothing yo...
Show tunes are great. Stephen Sondheim. Rodgers and Hammerstein. Wicked. Rent. The Music Man. Almost any musical will do. Except Cats. Why? Doesn’t it shut out the voices? No, it shuts them out fine....
Perhaps that's how I should think of them, Polly thought, the troupe and Miss Snelgrove and Trot. And Sir Godfrey. Not as lost to her, but as removed to this moment in time for safekeeping.
Madame Iritosky opened her mouth, closed it, and opened it again, looking exactly like Colonel Mering’s globe-eyed ryunkin. Fish? Baine said, bending over her with the platter of sole. Round One to ou...