My dear boy, Miss Frost said sharply. My dear boy, please don't put a label on me - don't make a category before you get to know me!
Mr. Wiggin injected a kind of horror-movie element into the Christmas miracle; to the rector, every Bible story was-if properly understood-threatening.
Men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should watch for those moments when it is possible to play God
Melville’s Moby-Dick—
Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer's irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.
Many of Juan Diego's demons had been his childhood companions-he knew them so well, they were as familiar as friends.
Lupe’s language is just a little different, Juan Diego was saying. I can understand it.
Listen to me, Bill, Richard said. Let the librarian be your new best friend. If you like what she's given you to read, trust her. The library, the theater, a passion for novels and plays - well, Bill,...
LAST NITE I HAD A DREAM. NOW I KNOW FOUR THINGS. I KNOW THAT MY VOICE DOESN’T CHANGE – BUT I STILL DON’T KNOW WHY. I KNOW THAT I AM GOD’S INSTRUMENT. I KNOW WHEN I’M GOING TO DIE – AND NOW A DREAM HAS...
It is the well educated who will improve society—and they will improve it, at first, by criticizing it, and we are giving them the tools to criticize it. Naturally, as students, the brighter of them w...
It is occasionally necessary for me to tell Torontonians of the presence of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans; they tend to think of the Great Lakes as the waters of the world.
Is it a democratic society that condemns people to the accident of conception? What are we-monkeys? If you expect people to be responsible for their children, you have to give them the right to choose...
In addition to suffering her husband’s scathing portrayal of a shrewish wife and mother, Nana Victoria had to sit not more than two seats away from the transsexual wrestler!)
In Wally’s bedroom Homer marveled at how the world was simultaneously being invented and destroyed.Nothing marvelous about that, Dr. Larch would have assured him. At St. Cloud’s, except for the irrita...
If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salv...
I won’t pretend that it wasn’t gratifying to hear this, but I would rather have heard it privately; it wasn’t something I wanted to share with Tom Atkins.
I think now that is the nature of hymns-they make us want to repeat them...they are a part of any service, and often the only part of a funeral service, that makes us feel everything is acceptable.
I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.’ (David Copperfield)But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those da...
His exposure to storytelling, through Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte, had ill prepared him for characters who came from and traveled nowhere -- or for stories that made no sense.
He was one of those people things came easily to, but he did little to demonstrate that he deserved to be gifted.