This because it is never really very cold in England. It is drizzly, and the wind will blow; hail happens, and there is a breed of Tuesday in January in which time creeps and no light comes and the ai...
They were smooth and bright, and their timing was wonderful, and they were young and hilarious. It was really something to see, they thought, and this was why they spoke loudly and gestured, inviting...
They were married though they needn’t have married, and though both had sworn they never would be. It is hard to explain—in that game of musical chairs—why they should have stopped, finally, at each o...
They caught up with each other's news casually, leaving long, cosy gaps of silence in which to go to work on their muffins and coffees. Jerome - after two months of having to be witty and brilliant in...
These forms of criticism that make black women the privileged readers of a black woman writer go against Hurston’s own grain. She saw things otherwise: When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter...
There are two different kinds of glee club in this world. The first sing barbershop favourites and Gershwin tunes, they swing gently, moving from side to side and sometimes clicking their fingers and...
Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
The only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving toward genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn...
Sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it's Allah's turn or his own.
So shut it. Go on. Try it. Silence. Ah.’ She reached into the air as if trying to touch the quiet she had created. ‘Isn’t that something? Did you know this is how other families are? They’re quiet. As...
She was motivated by something else: impatience. To Aimee poverty was one of the world’s sloppy errors, one among many, which might be easily corrected if only people would bring to the problem the fo...
She wanted to read things -- could not resist wanting to read things -- and reading was easily done, and relatively inexpensive. On the other hand, that she should receive any praise for such reflexiv...
She struggled to think of anyone besides perhaps James Baldwin and Jesus who had experiences the profound isolation and loenliness she now knew to be the one and only true reality of this world.
Rightfully she should have been fearful of life. Instead she was recklessly bold.
People are not poor because they’ve made bad choices, my mother liked to say, they make bad choices because they’re poor.
On Brexit:What have they done? we said to each other, sometimes meaning the leaders, who we felt must have known what they were doing, and sometimes meaning the people, who, we implied, didn't. Now I'...
Oh, there was a certain pleasure. And don’t ever underestimate people, don’t ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own, from delivering bad news, watching bo...
Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.
Obscurely disappointed, as we sometimes are when the things we profess to dislike don't happen, she looked up abruptly and smiled at him.
No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be...