She had been wrong in thinking Christ had been called up against his will to fight in a war. He didn't look - in spite of the crown of thorns - like someone making a sacrifice. Or even like someone de...
People will buy anything at jumble sales,' I said. 'At the Evacuated Children Charity Fair a woman bought a tree branch that had fallen on the table.
A Grand Design we couldn't see because we were part of it. A Grand Design we only got occasional, fleeting glimpses of. A Grand Design involving the entire course of history and all of time and space...
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...
Are you making something up in your head, miss? —FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT, A Little Princess Zener
You can’t go back, Gilchrist said. Haven’t you heard? We’re under quarantine, thanks to Mr. Dunworthy’s carelessness.
Will I ever see you again? No. Do I love you? Yes, for all time.
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...
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...
If King Harold had had swans on his side, England would still be Saxon.
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...
I don't know who started the myth that sheep are fluffy and white. They were more the color of an old mop and just as matted with dirt.
For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost.
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...
What the hell is ‘emotional bonding,’ anyway? It sounds like something out of Fifty Shades of Grey.
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.
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...
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.