Jess drew the way some people drink whiskey. The peace would start at the top of his muddled brain and seep down through his tired and tensed-up body.
If we marvel at the artist who has written a great book, we must marvel more at those people whose lives are works of art and who don't even know it, who wouldn't believe it if they were told. However...
I see a land bright and clearAnd the time's coming nearWhen we'll live in this landYou and me, hand in hand.
He put down his roll and reached over and took her gnarled hand, stroking the back of it with his thumb. I'm trying to tell the child something only you and I can understand. How good it is to be old....
He had promised Leslie that after Christmas he would stay home and fix up the house and plant his garden and listen to music and read books out loud and write only in his spare time.
Gee, I’m really glad I came.Jess turned to Leslie in unbelief.It was better than a movie.You’re kidding.No, I’m not. And she wasn’t. He could tell by her face. That whole Jesus thing is really interes...
For the only time in my life I would be living with a chain-smoking semi-invalid whose chief point of pride in life was his membership in the Ku Klux Clan.
Everybody is somebobdy and I chanllenge anybody to deny it.
Don't tell me no one ever gave you a chance. You don't need anything given to you. You can make your own chances. But first you have to know what you're after, my dear.
Burke Ellie
Brenda’s pouting voice broke in, Your girl friend’s dead, and Momma thought you was dead, too.
Brenda burst in. Do you know what some people do? They charge something and wear it, and then take it back and say it didn’t fit or something. The stores don’t give ’em no trouble. Her father turned i...
. . Jess believed, that she thought he was the best. It was not the kind of best that counted either at school or at home, but it was a genuine kind of best. He kept the knowledge of it buried inside...
To my father’s amazement, was an ancient but clearly recognizable painting of Marco Polo, who must have visited Huai’an during his thirteenth-century travels about China. The priest asked my father to...
Life ain't supposed to be nothing, 'cept maybe tough
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.
You're the proverbial diamond in the rough.
We're alike, Jess would tell himself, me and Miss Edmunds . . . We don't belong at Lark Creek, Julia and me.
That was the rule that you never mixed up troubles at home with life at school. When parents were poor or ignorant or mean, or even just didn't believe in having a TV set, it was up to their kids to p...
Sometimes it seemed to him that his life was delicate as a dandelion. One little puff from any direction, and it was blown to bits.