When it comes time to decide who gets the bottom bunk, I think anyone would agree that there’s a lot to be said for doing things the hard way.
Later that night I met a Bulgarian. In my country, you say to someone you hate, ‘May you build a house from your kidney stones.’ Well, finally, I thought.
Leeches are singing in my asshole.
That, the chief counselor said, is what happens to people who play around. If this was the punishment for a boy and a girl, I felt certain the penalty for two boys somehow involved barbed wire, a team...
On a recent flight from Tokyo to Beijing, at around the time that my lunch tray was taken away, I remembered that I needed to learn Mandarin. Goddamnit, I whispered. I knew I forgot something.
The slumber party took place in what the Methodists called a family room, the Catholics used as an extra bedroom, and the neighborhood's only Jews had turned into a combination darkroom and fallout sh...
May 17, 1979 Raleigh Gas in four states is now selling for over $1 a gallon.
The crummy part of swimming is that while you’re doing it you can’t really see much: the bottom of the pool, certainly, a smudged and fleeting bit of the outside world as you turn your head to breathe...
Well, where did it come from? I asked. How did I get it?
At what point had I realized that class couldn’t save you, that addiction or mental illness didn’t care whether you’d taken piano lessons or spent a summer in Europe?
Something has changed, and now, when I look at my students, I see only people who are going to eat up my time.
Hugh and I returned to Normandy the following summer, and I resumed my identity as the village idiot. See you again yesterday! I said to the butcher. Ashtray! Bottleneck!
You kids might think you’re close, but just wait until your father and I are gone, and you’re left to divide up our property.
Anyone who watches even the slightest amount of TV is familiar with the scene: An agent knocks on the door of some seemingly ordinary home or office. The door opens, and the person holding the knob is...
Nobody dreams of the things he already has.
Me: Did you get your tree yet? Ken: I’m a Jew, I don’t decorate Christmas trees. Me: So you’re going to go with a wreath instead? Ken: I just told you, I’m a Jew. Me: Oh, I get it. You’re looking for...
Me: Did you get your tree yet?Ken: I'm a Jew, I don't decorate Christmas trees.Me: So you're going to go with a wreath instead?Ken: I just told you, I'm a Jew.Me: Oh, I get it. You're looking for a ch...
If I could believe in myself, why not give other improbabilities the benefit of the doubt? I accepted the idea that an omniscient God had cast me in his own image and that he watched over me and guide...
I should be used to the way Americans dress when traveling, yet it still manages to amaze me. It’s as if the person next to you had been washing shoe polish off a pig, then suddenly threw down his spo...
That’s the problem with wishes, they ensnare you. In fairy tales they’re nothing but trouble, magnifying the greed and vanity of the person for whom they are granted.
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