Everybody looked at Sully suspiciously. A rumor that he had burned up in the blaze had been circulating, and people had quickly adjusted to the idea of profound human tragedy. They were reluctant to g...
And there comes a time in your life when you realize that if you don't take the opportunity to be happy, you may never get another chance again.
Books by her favorite Golden Age British mystery writers—Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, John Dickson Carr, and Agatha Christie—evil
[My] explanation makes such immediate sense that I can give it up only reluctantly, a necessary concession to my physician's expertise. This is the way my students feel, I realize, when I suggest styl...
Worse, I have to admit to feeling the jealousy of one crab for another that has managed to climb out of the barrel.
When you tossed pebbles down from the embankment, they believed in God. One
There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.
The attraction of cynicism was that it so often put you in the right, as if being right led directly to happiness.
Rub wiped his nose on his sleeve. I just wisht— What? Rub sighed. Where to begin? That I’d be nicer to you? He shrugged again, but this was the gist of it, Sully could tell. I wish I would, too, he sa...
Lest it seem that I was neglected, I should point out that once I became known to the Mohawk Grill crowd, it was like having about two dozen more or less negligent fathers whose slender attentions and...
In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise.
I began to develop a firm conviction that most efforts to teach people things were wasted. All they needed was to go off some place quiet and read. Around
Have you ever noticed that when people use the expression 'I have to say', what follows usually needn't be said?
For fairness and loyalty, however important to the head, were issues that could seldom be squared in the human heart, at the deepest depths of which lay the mystery of affection, of love, which you ei...
Whereas God, for reasons of His own, sometimes chooses to let the machine answer. The Supreme Being is unavailable to come to the phone at this time, but He wants you to know what your call is importa...
That afternoon I came to understand that one of the deepest purposes of intellectual sophistication is to provide distance between us and our most disturbing personal truths and gnawing fears.
She had always seemed to him to be deep-down wild, the wilder because she harnessed that wildness most of the time.
Lives are rivers. We imagine we can direct their paths, though in the end there’s but one destination, and we end up being true to ourselves only because we have no choice.
I’ve always known that there’s more going on inside me than finds its way into the world, but this is probably true of everyone. Who doesn’t regret that he isn’t more fully understood?
It's possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated.