Your grandmother thought--no, she believed, it was like a faith for her. She believed it the way some people believe in God or science. She believed that it was the rules that made her life so easy. S...
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, sometimes...
She couldn’t get any farther away inside from her skin. She couldn’t get away.
Whatever Blithe wanted, she wanted absolutely and immediately. There was no budging Blithe.
She looked at her hand: Just some hand, holding a cheap pen. Some girls’ hand. She had nothing to do with that hand. Let that hand do whatever it wanted to.
They spent almost four dollars on supper at the mall, and none of them had dessert. They had hamburgers and french fries and, after Dicey thought it over, milkshakes.
It was almost as if he’d been a ghost in all those rooms, all those days, a ghost in his own life.
The No filled the whole air of the house. Every time she breathed in she breathed in that No.
Curled up, closed his eyes, and marched himself off, as if sleep were an actual place, like home, like the kitchen—a place a mouse could go to.
When Jeff Greene was in second grade, seven and a half years old, he got home from school one Tuesday afternoon in early March, and found a note from his mother, saying that she had gone away and woul...
To himself, he called it a safe place, and when they were finally settled in at the end of July, living in the three-room house where windows gave out over the water and woods and sky, he knew he had...
He fell into sleep then, as a body weighted with stones and wrapped in winding sheets falls into deep water.
When he sat in the rowboat again, the oars ready but not yet dipped into the water to take him away from the island, Jeff looked back. He didn’t see the busy land crabs nor the overgrown interior; he...
On this road they saw some other men, fishers and farmers Elske was told; some of the men were accompanied by women whose hair was wrapped around with colored cloths. These men and women stared at Els...
No fish were biting. Not that morning. She heard James calling her with panic in his voice. Slowly, she trudged back to her family. I told you, Sammy said to James, because the fishing line was
He was studying his grandmother, as if he was hungry too, but for something not food, hungry in a way that food could never fill.
Dicey looked out over the tall marsh grasses, blowing in the wind. If the wind blew, the grasses had to bend with it.
When this map was made, there was only empty forest in the south, Gran told Birle.Not empty, Granda corrected her. The forest is never empty.
At Beriel's silence she turned around -- and fury crashed against her like a wave thrown by a storm against the rocky coast.
When a daring idea first crosses one's mind, if it is to be realized in the future it is often appealing. Then, as the time for its execution comes nearer, one begins to dread that which had once been...