Please, he added. I meant to say, please. I've thought it all through. I've thought of nothing else. I haven't read a book in weeks!
Now I feel bad I didn’t give her the second quarter. Grandma says that’s called having a conscience.
In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time...I don't know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well...I guess the time gets spread very thin like butt...
In childhood, Lib remembered, family seemed as necessary and inescapable as a ring of mountains. One never imagined that as the decades went by, one might drift into an unbounded country.
I chop the broccoli into pieces with ZigZag Knife, sometimes I swallow some when Ma's not looking and she says, Oh, no, where's that big bit gone? but she's not really mad because raw things make us e...
How could the child bear not just the hunger, but the boredom? The rest of humankind used meals to divide the day, Lib realized - as a reward, as entertainment, the chiming of an inner clock. For Anna...
Hmm? No, it’s a photo of all these streets. The camera’s way up in space. Outer Space? Yeah. Cool. Officer Oh’s voice gets all excited. Three four nine Washington, shed in the rear, lit skylight . . ....
Half the country wouldn’t have died if the landlords hadn’t kept shipping away the corn, seizing cattle, rack-renting, evicting, torching cabins…Or if the government at Westminster hadn’t thought it t...
Good-bye, Room. I wave up at Skylight. Say good-bye, I tell Ma. Good-bye, Room. Ma says it but on mute. I look back one more time. It’s like a crater, a hole where something happened. Then we go out t...
But to sever all your connections, professional as well as personal... Lib fumbled for words. Wouldn't it be like a little death?Byrne nodded. I believe emigration generally is that. The price of a ne...
But the thing is, slavery’s not a new invention. And solitary confinement—did you know, in America we’ve got more than twenty-five thousand prisoners in isolation cells?
But for me, Room is a peculiar (and no doubt heretical) battle between Mary and the Devil for young Jesus. If God sounds absent from that triangle, that’s because I think that for a small child, God’s...
And the flames are every colour of the rainbow.They can't be, observed Daffy.Well, they are, she said cheekily. Have you been there, that you know so much about it?No, said Daffy, very calm, but I'd w...
All this reverential—I’m not a saint. Ma’s voice is getting loud again. I wish people would stop treating us like we’re the only ones who ever lived through something terrible. I’ve been finding stuff...
All the women I knew carried some kind of blade, though they were not all metal, or even visible. Whether something had happened to them, or whether they had only anticipated it, it kept them awake th...
Actually, Saint Peter was in jail, one time --I laugh. Babies don't go in jail.This happened when they were all grown up.I didn't know Baby Jesus grows up.
A fast didn't go fast; it was the slowest thing there was. Fast meant a door shut fast, firmly. A fastness, a fortress. To fast was to hold fast to emptiness, to say no and no and no again.
Sentences swallowed and sung back and swallowed all over again. She was made entirely out of words.
Says the headline. Blanche skips over the details she already knows. How bizarre to see what she lived through last night turned into an item tucked between stock prices and Crazy Horse whupping the a...
Why are places to eat called coffee shops? I ask him. Well, coffee’s the most important thing they sell because most of us need it to keep us going, like gas in the car. Ma only drinks water and milk...