My parents have lived longer than most and have expected very little. We have been blessed in too many ways to count.
My parents...were people running from the past, who didn't look back at much if they could help it, and whose whole life always lay somewhere in the offing.
I was an infant when my parents died.Thye both were ornithologists. I've triedSo often to evoke them that todayI have a thousand parents. Sadly theyDissolve in their own virtues and recede,But certain...
Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.
It's a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.
What is a parent, really, but somebody who picks up the things a child leaves behind - a trail made of stripped off clothing, orphaned shoes, tiny bright plastic game pieces, and nostalgia - and who...
Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born.
Becky -- he begins, and there's a tiny intake of breath around the churchyard. Will you-- Yes! Yeee-esssss! I hear the joyful sound ripping through the churchyard before I even realize I've opened my...
I know I'm a Third, I know it, if you want I'll go away so you don't have to be embarrassed in front of everybody, I'm sorry I lost the monitor and now you have three kids and no obvious explanation,...
All our lives my brother and I were caught by the fictions my parents told us-fictions about themselves as well as others. Each wanted us to judge the other in his or her favor. Sometimes I felt...
But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.
You're not supposed to laugh at your own father. Ever.
Mom always said people worried too much about their children. Suffering when you're young is good for you, she said. It immunized your body and your soul, and that was why she ignored us kids when we...
Matthew knew that phrenology was nonsense, and yet, years later, he found himself making judgments similar to those made by his father; slippery people looked slippery; they really did. And how we...
The Red Lion was a four-ale bar with a handful of lowbrowed sons of toil who looked as though they...
What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you...
Read me back the last line. 'Read me back the last line,' read back the corporal who could take...
Keep in mind that when we talk of a great painting we are not really talking about anything great....
Inscribed on the back was a line from Virgil in Latin: Audentes fortuna juvat. Fortune favors the...
The rain was pattering hypnotically on the plane's exterior.
He wondered often how he would ever recognize the first chill, flush, twinge, ache, belch, sneeze,...
Havermeyer was a lead bombardier who never missed. Yossarian was a lead bombardier who had been...
It isn't even good grammar. What the hell does it mean when they disappear somebody?
