I thought I heard you—one of you—saying it was a pity—a pity I never had any children … eh? … But I have, you know … I have …

You cannot judge the importance of things by the noise they make.

Children are not coloring books. We cannot fill them with our favorite colors.

She had this laugh. I swear it's why I married her, Laila, for that laugh! It bulldozed you. You stood no chance against it.

So, then. You want a story and I will tell you one. But just the one. Don't either of you ask me for more. It's late, and we have a long day of travel ahead of us, Pari, you and I. You will need your...

He says this is war. There is no shame in war. Tell him he's wrong. War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.

All my life, I'd been around men. That night, I discovered the tenderness of a woman.

And this is what I want you to understand, that good, real good, was born out of your father's remorse. Sometimes, I think everything he did, feeding the poor on the streets, building the orphanage,...

There is a force of persuasion in the scent, stronger than that of words, glances, feelings, and will. It cannot be rejected, it penetrates our lungs like the air we breathe, it overflows within us,...

I thought that if you have to play wrong to realize, then it's better if you never realize. Do you see, that's just how I am.

Only thieves and children run.

Perhaps thee will best understand what Abigail is like if I tell thee that when she quilts she prefers to stitch in the ditch, hiding her poor stitches in the seams between the blocks.

This story is about John, who was a private in the 2nd Georgia Battalion Infantry. I had always been told that John had taken part in Pickett's Charge, the bloody assault on Cemetery Ridge on July 3,...

Handle with care - everything - even the predators.

It was the same way with silence. This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel.

The minute we begin to think we have all the answers, we forget the questions.

We do learn and develop when we are exposed to those who are greater than we are. Perhaps this is the chief way we mature.

Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn't vanished with him. Perhaps her mind would go on...

All its dimensions with their projected geometries are those of an unrealisable dream.

I'm letting this Rebecca mystery make my mind run wild. Actually, my whole life feels like it's running wild whereas only weeks before it was calm and uneventful. I'm standing on a high-rise ledge and...

I take a long drag on the Malediction like maybe it'll start a tornado and carry me back home like Dorothy.

Like a man once said: 'I'm not afraid of death. I just don't want to be there when it happens.' The

Women struggled to enter the all-male professional schools. Dr. Harriot Hunt, a woman physician who began to practice in 1835, was twice refused admission to Harvard Medical School. But she carried on...

During elections for the 1776 convention to frame a constitution for Pennsylvania, a Privates Committee urged voters to oppose great and overgrown rich men . . . they will be too apt to be framing...

Revolutionary America may have been a middle-class society, happier and more prosperous than any other in its time, but it contained a large and growing number of fairly poor people, and many of them...

True, fascism was not to be tolerated by decent people. But neither was racism or colonialism or slave labor camps—one or another of which was a characteristic of all of the Allied powers.

Truth be told, John said, the one thing in this world I want more than anything else is a great big crowbar, to jimmy myself open and take whatever creature that's sitting inside and shake it clean...

After all, in the end all the great moments of history have taken place inside people's heads. The moments of change, or the clinamen as the Greeks called it.

Yeah, hey you know carbon sinks are so crucial, scrubbing CO2 out of the air may eventually turn out to be our only option, so maybe we should reverse those two clauses. Make carbon sinks come first...

In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing.