The heat of late afternoon closed in around us like an animate thing; you could feel it on your skin, warm and moist, like a great beast panting. The air was so dense it seemed to require a huge effor...
The cottage was set hard into the side of the hill, crouching before the winter winds that roared across the moors. It announced itself by smell long before you could catch sight of it. Sometimes sick...
The brave man, the real hero, quakes with terror, sweats, feels his very bowels betray him, and in spite of this moves forward to do the act he dreads. And yet I do not think
The best short stories and the most successful jokes have a lot in common. Each form relies on suggestion and economy. Characters have to be drawn in a few deft strokes. There's generally a setup, a r...
The T is the oldest subway system in the United States, and I figure if it has lasted this long, it must have been built right in the first place. The train I took from the airport gradually filled wi...
My mother, my grandmother and my great-grandmother all told me it was right, that without it a woman wouldn’t be able to control herself, that she would end up a prostitute, said Aset, a beautiful twe...
It's too late, she said, her voice trembling. You are not the beautiful innocent vagabond walking toward me under the dogwood blossoms, with his trunks and his head full of worthless notions. And I am...
In fact, the majlis was an intensely feudal scene, with respectful subjects waiting humbly for a few seconds’ opportunity to whisper in their prince’s ear.
If Islamic countries can’t come up with their own principles for women’s competition, she said in one widely reported speech, then the way dictated by Western oppressing countries will be imposed on u...
I wanted to give a sense of the people of the book, the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it.
I remember arguing that moral greatness had little meaning without action to effect the moral end.
I need, I suppose, to account for my life, and for my part in Caleb’s crossing from his world into mine, and what flowed on from it.
I have lived most of my life in soldiers’ camps. I know what they saw. I know how they think. Their confidence sours as sudden as curdled milk.
I had begun this journey following him into the hidden corners of his world and here it ended with him crossed over into the brightest heights of mine.
I asked once, and the library assistant told me there were more than a hundred thousand books there, and more than sixty million pages of documents. It's a good number, I think: ten pages for every pe...
I am not alone in this. I only let him do to me what men have ever done to women: march off to empty glory and hollow acclaim and leave us behind to pick up the pieces. The broken cities, the burned b...
I am not a hero. Life has not required it of me.
How often it is that an idea that seems bright bossed and gleaming in its clarity when examined in a church, or argued over with a friend in a frosty garden, becomes clouded and murk-stained when drag...
How do we tumble down a hill? A foot placed incautiously on an unsteady rock or loosened turf, an ankle twisted or a knee buckled, and of a sudden we are gone, our body lost to our own control until w...
He walked through the woods like a young Adam, naming creation.