If you could hold your nose to avoid a stink, or close your eyes to cut out a sight, why not shut off your brain to avoid a thought?
I stood there and watched thirty-five children disappear in almost as many different directions and was suddenly horrified by what I’d done. What if someone got lost or hurt? Suppose they didn’t come...
I had no study in those days, not even a desk or file or bookcase to call mine alone....It might have happened sooner [the writing of work worthy of publication] had I had a room of my own and fewer c...
I ain’t got no blood claim on you, and the Lord in Heaven knows I want you to have a good life with your own people. But—her huge bass voice broke up into little squeaky pieces—but it’s killing me to...
He may not have been born with guts, but he didn't have to die without them.
He lived long enough to give the chaplain his name—John Goetchius—but died before he could tell the kind man where his home was.
Corre um boato por ai, que a linda menina que vem hoje, pode ser a rainha que eles estão esperando.
Are you tired, Mary? I asked. She raised her weary gaze to me. My socks are tired, she said. And my shoes won’t even walk. To this day whenever in our family we want to express complete exhaustion, we...
A colleague of hers had discovered that the Biblical sentence found in John 4:7 contained all the sounds in nearly every known language.
She had stood at the gate of her compound and told the Japanese soldiers there that if they tried to come in and get her girls, they would have to do it across her dead body. This
One day when I was changing her diapers she took my hand and put it on her tummy, so I tickled her. My reward was her first smile.
All my ancestors were from the South and some even fought and died for the losing side. Perhaps that’s why I was long resigned to my failure to publish.
A frightening number of whom had IQ scores in the low 70s? I stopped reading and just stuck the records out of sight in a bottom drawer of my desk, and never thought of them again until the end of the...
You never know ahead of time what something is really going to be like.
What is man—and of course the writer means all of us puny little insignificant creatures—what is a mere human being that God who made the immense universe should ever notice?' She chuckled. 'The sky d...
We all learn here by the honorable path of horrible mistakes.
They were always nice to Jess when he went over, but then they would suddenly begin talking about French politics or string quartets (which he at first thought was a square box made out of string), or...
St. Faith’s, as she called her compound, was financed entirely by donations, some from friends abroad and some from admiring Chinese benefactors.
On Decoration Day, while everyone else in town was at the cemetery decorating the graves of our Glorious War Dead, Willie Beaner and me, Robert Burns Hewitt, took Mabel Cramm's bloomers and run them u...
Leslie called them Judy and Bill, which bothered Jess more than he wanted it to. It was none of his business what Leslie called her parents. But he just couldn’t get used to it.