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
Daredevil nature as a young man. When I read what William Roth had written, I sighed. So that was where my own two boys had gotten the trait that was turning their mother’s hair gray.
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 save the whales and shoot the people, huh?
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 must have received our share of startled looks from the crew and other passengers—this seven-member family emerging from their third-class lower deck and climbing into a waiting chauffeur-driven li...
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...
They ate a late lunch in the cafeteria. When she mentioned lunch, he realized with horror that he would need money, and he didn’t know how to tell her that he hadn’t brought any—didn’t have any to bri...
Then Jess gave himself over to the numbness that was buzzing to be let out from a corner of his brain.
The idea of living in the same house for all your childhood and having the same knot of devoted friends seemed magical to me, who had lived in thirteen different places by the time I was thirteen.
The 40th anniversary edition of the classic Newbery Medal-winning title by beloved author Katherine Paterson, with brand-new bonus materials including an author's note by Katherine herself and a forew...
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.
If you wanted to greet him or get his attention, you had to say: Oh, Mr. Forest-Ranger-who-stands-in-the-tower-watching-out-for-forest fires! If you abbreviated it, or, heaven help us, addressed him s...
I see a land bright and clearAnd the time's coming nearWhen we'll live in this landYou and me, hand in hand.
I had so looked forward to her walking. Maud carried her thirteen-month-old sister a few steps away and put her down on her feet. Walk to Daddy, Maud said, and the baby threw out her arms and took the...
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...