Everyday people with the goal of reading 50 books a year.
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Sonny Boy, a painter cannot paint, sculptor sculpt, photographer photograph, musician compose, not without the experience; your birth was to enhance my art. Art enhanced. Now how do I get rid of you? All evidence of you. Everything. I should kill you. Artfully, I've done it before. What a requiem I would compose. Sonny Boy, I had to birth you. I thought you were the blessing of a uterine lining,…
When our daughters were small, I'd sometimes dump a bunch of building toys on the floor (Legos and wooden blocks and parts of other sets) and we'd sit there for hours, listening to music and talking and absentmindedly making something. There was no plan; we were just putting this with that, because we liked the way it looked. But pretty soon, a structure would start to appear. The ramps were…
I despise the dust of which I am composed: anyone can pursue and put an end to this dust. But I defy anybody to snatch from me what I have given myself, an independent life in the sky of the centuries. G. is the illegitimate son of an American divorcee and an Italian candy manufacturer who grows up in England. That makes him, in some sense, both no one and everyone, an heir to the international…
Do you know this syndrome? Do you have it? I'll tell you. You're having a hard time, say, because something not very nice once happened to you. It was a big thing, and although it's supposed to be over, in your body and in your head and from the way you now look out on the world, it's not bloody over, it's still bloody going on. Or maybe it wasn't a big thing. Maybe it was a series of little…
Foam's ebullience depressed Harbans more. The bargaining with Baksh had shaken him and he feared that Chittaranjan too might demand stiffer terms. Moreover, he was nervous about the Dodge; and the sweet drink and rock cakes he had had were playing hell with his inside. 'You shy, Mr Harbans,' Foam said. 'I know how it is. But you going to get use to this waving. Ten to one, before this election…
Though Jody required the younger one to stay indoors during the day, it was typical for neighbors to see Mice hurtling down Reef Way or through neighborhood side streets at sunset. Perhaps the girl's racing around in the evenings satisfied a need. In the small apartments those months, I watched the half-sisters near-always, impatient to be part of their togetherness and clashes both. Soon after…
We knew what kind of show it was, my wife and I, so we've got no grounds to play the innocent. It's just you'd think with a nun behind it there'd be limits, some kind of safety net. Not because I'm a believer. I don't believe in any religious communion or system. But an institution has always got something to lose, if only its self-image, which is why there are things you never believe it capable…
The Whatsisname was now at a loss for what to do. He knew his mission was essential to kill, to kill new people every day, but he no longer had a clear idea who should be killed or why. The flesh of the innocents, of which he was initially composed, had been replaced by new flesh, that of his own victims and criminals. He thought if he took too long avenging the victims in whose name he was…
The more I learned, the surer I became that I was bound to ride the trail. How else could I attain an encompassing grasp of the Pony Express without riding the old mail route? Anything short of doing so was shirking from the truth: that the only way to fully understand the breadth and nature of the Pony Express was to horseback it from one end to the other. It emerged as a challenge, a pinnacle of…
Far into the night she sat writing letters, drafting memoranda. She dragged any member of the Higher Education Committee whom she could lure into her buildings from cellar to garret, exposing their enormities. Her energy was unremitting. If the South Riding was not prepared to build a new school for her, she would make this old one a perpetual torment. And always as she planned and wrote and…
