Pen Down Quotes

Reparations,” said Jem very suddenly, setting down the pen he was holding. Will looked at him in puzzlement. “Is this a game? We just blurt out whatever word comes next to mind? In that case mine is ‘genuphobia’. It means an unreasonable fear of knees.” “What’s the word for a perfectly reasonable fear of annoying idiots?” inquired Jessamine.

Clary widened her eyes, which was good for keeping herself from crying. "Isabelle, can I ask you something?" "Sure," said Isabelle, wielding the eyeliner expertly. "Is Alec gay?" Isabelle's wrist jerked. The eyeliner skidded, inking a long line of black from the corner of Clary's eye to her hairline. "Oh hell," Isabelle said, putting the pen down.

Vhat ozzer abilities do you haf?" ter Borcht snapped, which his assistant waited, pen in hand. Gazzy thought. "I have X-ray vision," he said. He peered at ter Borcht's chest, then blinked and looked alarmed. Ter Borcht was startled for a second, but then he frowned. "Don't write dat down," he told his assistant in irritation. The assistant froze in midsentence. "You. Do you haf any qualities dat distinguish you in any way?" Nudge chewed on a fingernail. "You mean, like, besides the WINGS?" She shook her shoulders gently, and her beautiful fawn-colored wings unfolded a bit. His face flushed, and I felt like cheering. "Yes," he said stiffly. "Besides de vings." "Hmm. Besides de vings." Nudge tapped one finger against her chin. "Um..." Her face brightened. "I once ate nine Snickers bars in one sitting. Without barfing. That was a record!" "Hardly a special talent," ter Borcht said witheringly. Nudge was offended. "Yeah? Let's see YOU do it." ... "I vill now eat nine Snickers bars," Gazzy said in a perfect, creepy imitation of ter Borcht's voice, "visout bahfing." Iggy rubbed his forehead with one hand. "Well, I have a highly developed sense of irony." Ter Borcht tsked. "You are a liability to your group. I assume you alvays hold on to someone's shirt, yes? Following dem closely?" "Only when I'm trying to steal their dessert" ...Fang pretended to think, gazing up at the ceiling. "Besides my fashion sense? I play a mean harmonica." "I vill now destroy de Snickuhs bahrs!" Gazzy barked.

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.

It is much, much worse to receive bad news through the written word than by somebody simply telling you, and I’m sure you understand why. When somebody simply tells you bad news, you hear it once, and that’s the end of it. But when bad news is written down, whether in a letter or a newspaper or on your arm in felt tip pen, each time you read it, you feel as if you are receiving the bad news again and again.

Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.

It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day, but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail.

To Those Without Pity Cruel of heart, lay down my song. Your reading eyes have done me wrong. Not for you was the pen bitten, And the mind wrung, and the song written.

I become one of those people who walks alone in the dark at night while others sleep or watch Mary Tyler Moore reruns or pull all-nighters to finish up some paper that's due first thing tomorrow. I always carry lots of stuff with me wherever I roam, always weighted down with books, with cassettes, with pens and paper, just in case I get the urge to sit down somewhere, and oh, I don't know, read something or write my masterpiece. I want all my important possessions, my worldly goods, with me at all times. I want to hold what little sense of home I have left with me always.

I will love you with no regard to the actions of our enemies or the jealousies of actors. I will love you with no regard to the outrage of certain parents or the boredom of certain friends. I will love you no matter what is served in the world’s cafeterias or what game is played at each and every recess. I will love you no matter how many fire drills we are all forced to endure, and no matter what is drawn upon the blackboard in blurry, boring chalk. I will love you no matter how many mistakes I make when trying to reduce fractions, and no matter how difficult it is to memorize the periodic table. I will love you no matter what your locker combination was, or how you decided to spend your time during study hall. I will love you no matter how your soccer team performed in the tournament or how many stains I received on my cheerleading uniform. I will love you if I never see you again, and I will love you if I see you every Tuesday. I will love you if you cut your hair and I will love you if you cut the hair of others. I will love you if you abandon your baticeering, and I will love you if you if you retire from the theater to take up some other, less dangerous occupation. I will love you if you drop your raincoat on the floor instead of hanging it up and I will love you if you betray your father. I will love you even if you announce that the poetry of Edgar Guest is the best in the world and even if you announce that the work of Zilpha Keatley Snyder is unbearably tedious. I will love you if you abandon the theremin and take up the harmonica and I will love you if you donate your marmosets to the zoo and your tree frogs to M. I will love you as a starfish loves a coral reef and as a kudzu loves trees, even if the oceans turn to sawdust and the trees fall in the forest without anyone around to hear them. I will love you as the pesto loves the fettuccini and as the horseradish loves the miyagi, as the tempura loves the ikura and the pepperoni loves the pizza. I will love you as the manatee loves the head of lettuce and as the dark spot loves the leopard, as the leech loves the ankle of a wader and as a corpse loves the beak of the vulture. I will love you as the doctor loves his sickest patient and a lake loves its thirstiest swimmer. I will love you as the beard loves the chin, and the crumbs love the beard, and the damp napkin loves the crumbs, and the precious document loves the dampness in the napkin, and the squinting eye of the reader loves the smudged print of the document, and the tears of sadness love the squinting eye as it misreads what is written. I will love you as the iceberg loves the ship, and the passengers love the lifeboat, and the lifeboat loves the teeth of the sperm whale, and the sperm whale loves the flavor of naval uniforms. i will love you as a child loves to overhear the conversations of its parents, and the parents love the sound of their own arguing voices, and as the pen loves to write down the words these voices utter in a notebook for safekeeping. I will love you as a shingle loves falling off a house on a windy day and striking a grumpy person across the chin, and as an oven loves malfunctioning in the middle of roasting a turkey. I will love you as an airplane loves to fall from a clear blue sky and as an escalator loves to entangle expensive scarves in its mechanisms. I will love you as a wet paper towel loves to be crumpled into a ball and thrown at a bathroom ceiling and as an eraser loves to leave dust in the hairdos of people who talk too much. I will love you as a cufflink loves to drop from its shirt and explore the party for itself and as a pair of white gloves loves to slip delicately into the punchbowl. I will love you as the taxi loves the muddy splash of a puddle and as a library loves the patient tick of a clock.

It's an illusion I've noticed before-- words on a page are like oxygen to a petrol engine, firing up ghosts. It only lasts while the words are in your head. After you put down the paper or pen, the pistons fall lifeless again.

The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up.

I don’t keep a travel diary. I did keep a travel diary once and it was a big mistake. All I remember of that trip is what I bothered to write down. Everything else slipped away, as though my mind felt jilted by my reliance on pen and paper. For exactly the same reason I don’t travel with a camera. My holiday becomes the snapshots and anything I forget to record is lost.

You don't know what it's like to grow up with a mother who never said a positive thing in her life, not about her children or the world, who was always suspicious, always tearing you down and splitting your dreams straight down the seams. When my first pen pal, Tomoko, stopped writing me after three letters she was the one who laughed: You think someone's going to lose life writing to you? Of course I cried; I was eight and I had already planned that Tomoko and her family would adopt me. My mother of course saw clean into the marrow of those dreams, and laughed. I wouldn't write to you either, she said. She was that kind of mother: who makes you doubt yourself, who would wipe you out if you let her. But I'm not going to pretend either. For a long time I let her say what she wanted about me, and what was worse, for a long time I believed her.

Marginalia Sometimes the notes are ferocious, skirmishes against the author raging along the borders of every page in tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien, they seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other comments are more offhand, dismissive - Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" - that kind of thing. I remember once looking up from my reading, my thumb as a bookmark, trying to imagine what the person must look like who wrote "Don't be a ninny" alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson. Students are more modest needing to leave only their splayed footprints along the shore of the page. One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's. Another notes the presence of "Irony" fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal. Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers, Hands cupped around their mouths. Absolutely," they shout to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin. Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!" Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points rain down along the sidelines. And if you have managed to graduate from college without ever having written "Man vs. Nature" in a margin, perhaps now is the time to take one step forward. We have all seized the white perimeter as our own and reached for a pen if only to show we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages; we pressed a thought into the wayside, planted an impression along the verge. Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria jotted along the borders of the Gospels brief asides about the pains of copying, a bird singing near their window, or the sunlight that illuminated their page- anonymous men catching a ride into the future on a vessel more lasting than themselves. And you have not read Joshua Reynolds, they say, until you have read him enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling. Yet the one I think of most often, the one that dangles from me like a locket, was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye I borrowed from the local library one slow, hot summer. I was just beginning high school then, reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room, and I cannot tell you how vastly my loneliness was deepened, how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed, when I found on one page A few greasy looking smears and next to them, written in soft pencil- by a beautiful girl, I could tell, whom I would never meet- Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.

Hamlet promised himself he’d throw down afterward, but I think perhaps when he said, “From this time forth, my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” the limits of blank verse weakened his resolve somehow. If he’d been free to follow the dictates of his conscience rather than the pen of Shakespeare, perhaps he would have abandoned verse altogether, like me, and contented himself with this instead: “Bring it, muthafuckas. Bring it.

We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn't matter. . . Recording the details of our lives is a stance against bombs with their mass ability to kill, against too much speed and efficiency. A writer must say yes to life, to all of life: the water glasses, the Kemp's half-and-half, the ketchup on the counter. It is not a writer's task to say, "It is dumb to live in a small town or to eat in a café when you can eat macrobiotic at home." Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist – the real truth of who we are: several pounds overweight, the gray, cold street outside, the Christmas tinsel in the showcase, the Jewish writer in the orange booth across from her blond friend who has black children. We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details from continuing.

Write your dreams in journal,note book, card or on a cork. When you pen down your dreams, an a inner strength and divine power is activated for your to work towards the fulfillment of your dreams.

Rosie, I'm returning to Boston tomorrow but before I go I wanted to write this letter to you. All the thoughts and feelings that have been bubbling up inside me are finally overflowing from this pen and I'm leaving this letter for you so that you don't feel that I'm putting you under any great pressure. I understand that you will need to take your time trying to decide on what I am about to say. I no what's going on, Rosie. You're my best friend and I can see the sadness in your eyes. I no that Greg isn't away working for the weekend. You never could lie to me; you were always terrible at it. Your eyes betray you time and time again. Don't pretend that everything is perfect because I see it isn't. I see that Greg is a selfish man who has absolutely no idea just how lucky he is and it makes me sick. He is the luckiest man in the world to have you, Rosie, but he doesn't deserve you and you deserve far better. You deserve someone who loves you with every single beat of his heart, someone who thinks about you constantly, someone who spends every minute of every day just wondering what you're doing, where you are, who you're with and if you're OK. You need someone who can help you reach your dreams and who can protect you from your fears. You need someone who will treat you with respect, love every part of you, especially your flaws. You should be with someone who can make you happy, really happy, dancing-on-air happy. Someone who should have taken the chance to be with you years ago instead of becoming scared and being too afraid to try. I am not scared any more, Rosie. I am not afraid to try. I no what the feeling was at your wedding - it was jealousy. My heart broke when I saw the woman I love turning away from me to walk down the aisle with another man, a man she planned to spend the rest of her life with. It was like a prison sentence for me - years stretching ahead without me being able to tell you how I feel or hold you how I wanted to. Twice we've stood beside each other at the altar, Rosie. Twice. And twice we got it wrong. I needed you to be there for my wedding day but I was too stupid to see that I needed you to be the reason for my wedding day. I should never have let your lips leave mine all those years ago in Boston. I should never have pulled away. I should never have panicked. I should never have wasted all those years without you. Give me a chance to make them up to you. I love you, Rosie, and I want to be with you and Katie and Josh. Always. Please think about it. Don't waste your time on Greg. This is our opportunity. Let's stop being afraid and take the chance. I promise I'll make you happy. All my love, Alex

I can sue you? Cool." I rummage around in my purse for a pen, wanting to write this down. "Under what? Medical malpractice? Assault with a deadly fang?" I look up. "How much you think the courts would award me for that?" Rayne frowns. "Sunny, stop being a bitch. Can't you see poor Magnus is freaking out here?" "I need to stop being a bitch? For Magnus's sake?" I stare at her, unbelieving. "Uh, hello? He's the guy who walked up and bit me for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

I know what she smells like. This little freckle on her neck when she pulls up her hair. Her upper lip is a little plumper than the lower. The curve of her wrist, when she holds a pen. It’s wrong, really wrong, but I know the shape of her. I go to sleep thinking about it, and then I wake up, go to work, and she is there, and it’s impossible. I tell her stuff I know she’ll agree to, just to hear her hum back at me. It’s like hot water down my fucking spine. She’s married. She’s brilliant. She trusts me, and all I think about is taking her to my office, stripping her, doing unspeakable things to her. And I want to tell her. I want to tell her that she’s luminous, she’s so bright in my mind, sometimes I can’t focus. Sometimes I forget why I came into the room. I’m distracted. I want to push her against a wall, and I want her to push back. I want to go back in time and punch her stupid husband on the day I met him and then travel back to the future and punch him again. I want to buy her flowers, food, books. I want to hold her hand, and I want to lock her in my bedroom. She’s everything I ever wanted and I want to inject her into my veins and also to never see her again. There’s nothing like her and these feelings, they are fucking intolerable. They were half-asleep while she was gone, but now she’s here and my body thinks it’s a fucking teenager and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. There is nothing I can do, so I’ll just . . . not.

I mostly want to remind her of the recipes of healing, and give her my own made-on-the spot remedy for the easing of her pain. I tell her, “Get a pen. Stop crying so you can write this down and start working on it tonight.” My remedy is long. But the last item on the list says: “When you wake up and find yourself living someplace where there is nobody you love and trust, no community, it is time to leave town – to pack up and go (you can even go tonight). And where you need to go is any place where there are arms that can hold you, that will not let you go.

We were not born to fight, but our cradles were built from struggles and hardship. Pens, swords, sticks—weapons shoved into our fists as soon as we’re old enough to grasp them. So we fight because the world will cut our throats otherwise. We fight, because we won’t go down without one.

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple with a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me. And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves and satin sandles, and say we've no money for butter. I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells And run my stick along the public railings And make up for the sobriety of my youth. I shall go out in my slippers in the rain and pick flowers in other people's gardens And learn to spit. You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat And eat three pounds of sausages at a go Or only bread and pickle for a week And hoard pens and pencils and beer mats and things in boxes. But now we must have clothes that keep us dry And pay our rent and not swear in the street And set a good example for the children.

Little Words When you are gone, there is nor bloom nor leaf, Nor singing sea at night, nor silver birds; And I can only stare, and shape my grief In little words. I cannot conjure loveliness, to drown The bitter woe that racks my cords apart. The weary pen that sets my sorrow down Feeds at my heart. There is no mercy in the shifting year, No beauty wraps me tenderly about. I turn to little words- so you, my dear, Can spell them out.

I have it in my head that when we’re born, God writes things down on our hearts. See, on some people’s hearts he writes “happy” and on some people’s hearts he writes “sad” and on some people’s hearts he writes “crazy” and on some people’s hearts he writes “genius” and on some people’s hearts he writes “angry” and on some people’s hearts he writes “winner” and on some people’s hearts he writes “loser.” I keep seeing a newspaper being tossed around in the wind. And then a strong gust comes along and the newspaper is thrown against a barbed wire fence and it gets ripped to shreds in an instant. That’s how I feel. I think God is the wind. It’s all like a game to him. Him. God. And it’s all pretty much random. He takes out his pen and starts writing on our blank hearts. When it came to my turn, he wrote “sad.” I don’t like God very much. Apparently, he doesn’t like me very much either.

If you were only one inch tall, you'd ride a worm to school. The teardrop of a crying ant would be your swimming pool. A crumb of cake would be a feast And last you seven days at least, A flea would be a frightening beast If you were one inch tall. If you were only one inch tall, you'd walk beneath the door, And it would take about a month to get down to the store. A bit of fluff would be your bed, You'd swing upon a spider's thread, And wear a thimble on your head If you were one inch tall. You'd surf across the kitchen sink upon a stick of gum. You couldn't hug your mama, you'd just have to hug her thumb. You'd run from people's feet in fright, To move a pen would take all night, (This poem took fourteen years to write-- 'Cause I'm just one inch tall).

he laid down his pen after a few moments. and there were no marks on the corner of the page. where his hand had been resting. the ink had run dry. there was nothing. nothing left.

I know that life is busy and hard and that there's crushing pressure to just settle down and get a real job and khaki pants and a haircut. But don't. Please don't. Please keep believing that life can be better, brighter, broader because of the art that you make. Please keep demonstrating the courage that it takes to swim upstream in a world that prefers putting away for retirement to putting pen to paper, that chooses practicality over poetry, that values you more for going to the gym than going to the deepest places in your soul. Please keep making your art for people like me, people who need the magic and imagination and honesty of great art to make the day-to-day world a little more bearable.

In other words you disappear, you become one with your words, not separate, and when you put your pen down, the you who was writing is gone.

Angry is just a pen name for sad,” Janet had explained. “In my experience, nine times out of ten if you are kind to the angry person, you will calm them down and find out what is really going on with them.

There would be little reason to lie down at night without the possibility of seeing things bigger and more amazing than the average day might bright about. Why pick up a pen or type on a keyboard if there's no imagination or wonder left to behold? I would hate to be in the position of hoping for nothing simply because my brain can no longer dream.

But when I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child, and the lines sloped down the page from left to right horizontally, as if they were loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come along and blown them askew.

We’re all meant to lean on something. Or someone.' I smile. He frowns. He surprises me and grabs the pen out of my hand. He starts writing something down in his neat block letters. He slides the journal back to me. 'I build walls around myself. I lean on those.' I don’t need to ask him why. Everybody builds walls—it’s for protection. I scribble quickly. 'Maybe you should break the walls down once in a while.' 'I’ll just build them up again', he writes. 'But maybe you’ll add a few windows the next time around. Or a door?

Racing up the wide staircase, I barreled through the double doors and smacked right into a brick wall. Stumbling backward, my arms flailed like a cracked-out crossing guard. My over-packed messenger bag slipped, pulling me to one side. My hair flew it front of my face, a sheet of auburn that obscured everything as I teetered dangerously. Oh dear God, I was going down. There was no stopping it. Visions of broken necks danced in my head. This was going to suck so— Something strong and hard went around my waist, stopping my free fall. My bag hit the floor, spilling overpriced books and pens across the shiny floor. My pens! My glorious pens rolled everywhere. A second later I was pressed against the wall. The wall was strangely warm. The wall chuckled. “Whoa,” a deep voice said. “You okay, sweetheart?

Zach, this isn't a game, you know. I don't just write it. I live it. I'm a Domme, a female Dominant. There aren't a lot of us around. Most Dominants are men. Technically I'm Switch since I can top and bottom, but if I show up on your doorstep, get ready to say ouch. I'm not good at it - I'm amazing at it. So good at it that I'm as famous down here for my skills with a whip as I am in the straight world for my skills with a pen.

I spend the rest of the night doing schoolwork. After striking a match and lighting a candal, I sit down at my desk with my quill pen and parchment to write an essay for my ethics class on the legalities of fan fiction.

The essence of what trauma does to a person is it makes them feel like they don’t deserve love,” the voice in my headphones said. I was on the train, on my way to yet another doctor’s appointment, but this statement rang so true that I dug furiously through my bag and pulled out a notebook to write it down. I was about to put away my pen when I heard another especially good line, so I kept it out, writing furiously on my lap. My friend Jen, who often sends me little poems and links throughout the day, sent me this podcast—Road to Resilience,

No war. Fight with your pen. Give your battle-cry in ink, and mark your dreams down on a page

I jotted the name down mentally on that tattered notepad I call a memory. The pen skipped.

First, consider the pen you write with. It should be a fast-writing pen because your thoughts are always much faster than your hand. You don't want to slow up your hand even more with a slow pen. A ballpoint, a pencil, a felt tip, for sure, are slow. Go to a stationery store and see what feels good to you. Try out different kinds. Don't get too fancy and expensive. I mostly use a cheap Sheaffer fountain pen, about $1.95.... You want to be able to feel the connection and texture of the pen on paper.

As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and examining it. ...This is our life and it's not going to last forever. There isn't time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write.

He wrote because he liked to write; he did not abridge, because he cared not to abridge. He sat down, he took pen and paper, because he loved Lucy and had much to say to her; because he was faithful and thoughtful, because he was tender and true.

The only way to compose myself and collect my thoughts," he wrote in his diary,"is to set down at my table, place my diary before me, and take my pen into my hand.

We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours for ever - the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass. All this happened so long ago. And I never returned, never wrote, never met anyone who might have given me news of Oxgodby. So, in memory, it stays as I left it, a sealed room furnished by the past, airless, still, ink long dry on a put-down pen. But this was something I knew nothing of as I closed the gate and set off across the meadow.

He puts down the pen, folds the sheet of paper, and slips it inside an envelope. He stands up, takes from his trunk a mahogany box, lifts the lid, lets the letter fall inside, open and unaddressed. In the box are hundreds of identical envelopes, open and unaddressed. He thinks that somewhere in the world he will meet a woman who has always been his woman. Every now and again he regrets that destiny has been so stubbornly determined to make him wait with such indelicate tenacity, but with time he has learned to consider the matter with great serenity. Almost every day, for years now, he has taken pen in hand to write to her. He has no names or addresses to put on the envelopes: but he has a life to recount. And to whom, if not to her? He thinks that when they meet it will be wonderful to place the mahogany box full of letters on her lap and say to her, 'I was waiting for you.' "She will open the box and slowly, when she so desires, read the letters one by one. As she works her way back up the interminable thread of blue ink she will gather up the years-- the days, the moments-- that that man, before he ever met her, had already given to her. Or perhaps more simply, she will overturn the box and astonished at that comical snowstorm of letters, she will smile, saying to that man, 'You are mad.' And she will love him forever.

This is the nature of love." Vashet said. "To attempt to describe it will drive a woman mad. This is what keeps poets scribbling endlessly away. If one could pin it to paper all complete, the others would lay down their pens. But it cannot be done.

She was extending a hand that I didn't know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence, she said, "You don't want to talk to me, do you?" I took my daybook out of my knapsack and found the next blank page, the second to last. "I don't speak," I wrote. "I'm sorry." She looked at the piece of paper, then at me, then back at the piece of paper, she covered her eyes with her hands and cried, tears seeped between her fingers, she cried and cried and cried, there weren't any napkins nearby, so I ripped the page from the book - "I don't speak. I'm sorry" - and used it to dry her cheeks, my explanation and apology ran down her face like mascara, she took my pen from me and wrote on the next blank page of my daybook, the final one: Please marry me I flipped back and pointed at: "Ha ha ha!" She flipped forward and pointed at: "Please marry me." I flipped back and pointed at: "Thank you, but I'm about to burst." She flipped forward and pointed at: "Please marry me." I flipped back and pointed at: "I'm not sure, but it's late." She flipped forward and pointed at: "Please marry me", and this time put her finger on "Please", as if to hold down the page and end the conversation, or as if she were trying to push through the word, and into what she was trying to say. I thought about life, about my life, the embarrassments, the little coincidences, the shadows of alarm clocks on bedside tables, I thought about my small victories and everything I'd seen destroyed. I'd swum through mink coats on my parents' bed while they hosted downstairs, I'd lost the only person with whom I could have spent my only life, I'd left behind a thousand tonnes of marble from which I could have released sculptures, I could have released myself from the marble of myself, I'd experienced joy, but not nearly enough, could there be enough? The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering, what a mess I am, I thought, what a fool, how foolish and narrow, how worthless, how pinched and pathetic, how helpless in the universe. None of my pets knows their own name. What kind of person am I? I flipped back, one page at a time: Help

Basically, if you want to become a good writer, you need to do three things. Read a lot, listen well and deeply, and write a lot. And don’t think too much. Just enter the heat of words and sounds and colored sensations and keep your pen moving across the page. If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you.

To picture him, sitting at his desk at home, scribbling away with a pen and paper, endears him to me so completely. It gives me shivers. Currents of electricity from my scalp down to my toes.

He slumped down into the pen, and the puppies immediately leapt on him. "Perhaps I'll see you later tonight." "If you're lucky," Celaena purred, and walked away. She smiled to herself as they strode through the castle. Eventully Nehemia turned to her. "Do you like him?" Celaena made a face. "Of course not. Why would I?" You converse easily. It seems as if you have...a connection." "A connection?" Celaena choked on the word. "I just enjoy teasing him." "It's not a crime if you consider him handsome. I'll admit I judged him wrong; I thought him to be a pompous, selfish idiot, but he's not so bad." "He's a Havilliard." "My mother was the daughter of a chief who sought to overthrow my grandfather." "We're both silly. It's nothing." "He seems to take great interest in you." Celaena's head whipped around, her eyes full of long-forgotten fury that made her belly ache and twist. "I would sooner cut out my own heart than love a Havilliard," she snarled. They completed their walk in silence, and when they parted ways, Celaena quickly wished Nehemia a pleasant evening before striding to her part of the castle.

Sandy fidgeted with his pen. “There’s something I didn’t write down. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you, you being a judge and all, but, well, Jake Wexler… he’s a bookie.” No, he should not have told her. “A small-time operator, I’m sure, Mr. McSouthers,” the judge replied coldly. “It can have no bearing on the matter before us. Sam Westing manipulated people, cheated workers, bribed officials, stole ideas, but Sam Westing never smoked or drank or placed a bet. Give me a bookie any day over such a fine, upstanding, clean-living man.

Ting. Tingle, tingle, tremble toes, She’s a good fisherman, catches hens, puts ‘em inna pens Wire blier, limber lock, three geese inna flock One flew east, one flew west One flew over the cuckoo’s nest O-U-T- spells out… goose swoops down and plucks you out.

Nev tossed his pen down. “Fine. Here goes: Ren and Cals lives may be torrid for the young ones in Vail are quite horrid Bine and Cos aren’t too frail Dax and Fey never pale while Ansel and Bryn might get sordid Bryn spit Diet Coke all over the table. Mason and Ansel clapped. I was too dumbfounded to react. This is qhat quiet Nev does in his spare time? “‘Bine’?” Sabine frowned while Cosette mopped up the soda that flowed to their end of the table. “Since when am I ‘Bine’? And we never call Cosette ‘Cos.’” “It’s about cadence,” Nev said. “Sorry. I said it wasn’t very good.” “Why aren’t you and Mason in it?” Ansel asked. “Oh, he has another one about us.” Mason wiggled his eyebrows.

If I’m going to lose it, I want to be broken in right.” The pen fell from Trenton’s mouth to the floor, and he bent down to pick it up. “Uh . . . any, uh . . . any special font?

But what little I can get down into my pen of what is so vivid to my eyes, and not only to my eyes; also to some nervous fibre, or fanlike membrane in my species.

How many great gems were lost to thought and not put down to pen. You can but think of just a few and then they're lost again.

The material came bubbling up inside like a geyser or an oil gusher. It streamed up of its own accord, down my arm and out of my fountain pen in a torrent of six thousand words a day.

I leaned down and kissed her mouth. It tasted salty, like her tears. This time, not warmth, but electricity shot from my mouth to my toes. I could feel tingling in my fingertips. It was like shoving a pen into an electrical outlet, which Link had dared me to do when I was eight years old. She closed her eyes and pulled me into her, and for a minute, everything was perfect. She kissed me, her lips beneath mine, and I knew she had been waiting for me, maybe just as long as I have been waiting for her. But then, as quickly as she had opened herself up to me, she shut me out. Or more accurately, pushed me back.

Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procures—there’s something sexual in it—that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can’t write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession. But I must return to Swann. My great adventure is really Proust. Well—what remains to be written after that? I’m only in the first volume, and there are, I suppose, faults to be found, but I am in a state of amazement; as if a miracle were being done before my eyes. How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped—and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp. The pleasure becomes physical—like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined. Jacques Raverat...sent me a letter about Mrs Dalloway which gave me one of the happiest moments days of my life. I wonder if this time I have achieved something? Well, nothing anyhow compared with Proust, in whom I am embedded now. The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut & as evanescent as a butterfly's bloom. And he will I suppose both influence me & make out of temper with every sentence of my own.

There is evidence that the honoree [Leonard Cohen] might be privy to the secret of the universe, which, in case you're wondering, is simply this: everything is connected. Everything. Many, if not most, of the links are difficult to determine. The instrument, the apparatus, the focused ray that can uncover and illuminate those connections is language. And just as a sudden infatuation often will light up a person's biochemical atmosphere more pyrotechnically than any deep, abiding attachment, so an unlikely, unexpected burst of linguistic imagination will usually reveal greater truths than the most exacting scholarship. In fact. The poetic image may be the only device remotely capable of dissecting romantic passion, let alone disclosing the inherent mystical qualities of the material world. Cohen is a master of the quasi-surrealistic phrase, of the "illogical" line that speaks so directly to the unconscious that surface ambiguity is transformed into ultimate, if fleeting, comprehension: comprehension of the bewitching nuances of sex and bewildering assaults of culture. Undoubtedly, it is to his lyrical mastery that his prestigious colleagues now pay tribute. Yet, there may be something else. As various, as distinct, as rewarding as each of their expressions are, there can still be heard in their individual interpretations the distant echo of Cohen's own voice, for it is his singing voice as well as his writing pen that has spawned these songs. It is a voice raked by the claws of Cupid, a voice rubbed raw by the philosopher's stone. A voice marinated in kirschwasser, sulfur, deer musk and snow; bandaged with sackcloth from a ruined monastery; warmed by the embers left down near the river after the gypsies have gone. It is a penitent's voice, a rabbinical voice, a crust of unleavened vocal toasts -- spread with smoke and subversive wit. He has a voice like a carpet in an old hotel, like a bad itch on the hunchback of love. It is a voice meant for pronouncing the names of women -- and cataloging their sometimes hazardous charms. Nobody can say the word "naked" as nakedly as Cohen. He makes us see the markings where the pantyhose have been. Finally, the actual persona of their creator may be said to haunt these songs, although details of his private lifestyle can be only surmised. A decade ago, a teacher who called himself Shree Bhagwan Rajneesh came up with the name "Zorba the Buddha" to describe the ideal modern man: A contemplative man who maintains a strict devotional bond with cosmic energies, yet is completely at home in the physical realm. Such a man knows the value of the dharma and the value of the deutschmark, knows how much to tip a waiter in a Paris nightclub and how many times to bow in a Kyoto shrine, a man who can do business when business is necessary, allow his mind to enter a pine cone, or dance in wild abandon if moved by the tune. Refusing to shun beauty, this Zorba the Buddha finds in ripe pleasures not a contradiction but an affirmation of the spiritual self. Doesn't he sound a lot like Leonard Cohen? We have been led to picture Cohen spending his mornings meditating in Armani suits, his afternoons wrestling the muse, his evenings sitting in cafes were he eats, drinks and speaks soulfully but flirtatiously with the pretty larks of the street. Quite possibly this is a distorted portrait. The apocryphal, however, has a special kind of truth. It doesn't really matter. What matters here is that after thirty years, L. Cohen is holding court in the lobby of the whirlwind, and that giants have gathered to pay him homage. To him -- and to us -- they bring the offerings they have hammered from his iron, his lead, his nitrogen, his gold.

The story that you wanted to write will never be pen down that way, The chapters of incidences will variate, The entrance and exit of characters will alter, The starting of pages might be different, The ending of pages might be unclear, The attractive introduction, The charming ending, Considering the facts in your mind, Concluding with ideas in your heart, The end product will be something else, The same goes with your life, This person is going to be my lover, friend, helper, and well-wisher, or in case some of you decide an enemy, We’re breathing humans, Our thoughts, our minds, our hearts, and our souls, everything works according to our moods, likes, dislikes, etc., There’s a problem with us, There’s a fault in ourselves, When we think that they’ll be there for us, No, they wouldn’t be, Why should they be? They have a different story to live, It’s not their duty to make your story happening, So be delighted with your tale, And enjoy whatever comes your way.

You see, Mr. Phillips, the truth of it is, I am so very American.” She slapped the pen down on the onerous paper and slid them both toward her boss. “And that is precisely why I can’t—no, why I refuse to sign this.

Bleak as the scene was, though, there was growing joy in Inman's heart. He was nearing home; he could feel it in the touch of thin air on skin, in his longing to see the lead of hearth smoke from the houses of people he had known all his life. People he would not be called upon to hate or fear. He rose and took a wide stance on the rock and stood and pinched down his eyes to sharpen the view across the vast propect to one far mountain. It stood apart from the sky only as the stroke of a poorly inked pen, a line thin and quick and gestural. But the shape slowly grew plain and unmistakable. It was to Cold Mountain he looked. He had achieved a vista of what for him was homeland.

Change is the nature of life, Cassidy. Some of it's good, like new babies being born and children growing up and leaving home and all the new adventures that both of those things bring. And sometimes change is more difficult - like when your dad died. But it's nothing to fear. Good or bad, when we rise up to meet it, change can make us stronger. It's what moved us farther along down the road ahead.

Footsteps approach the kitchen. Garrett wanders in, wiping sweat off his brow. When he notices Sabrina, he brightens. “Oh good. You’re here. Hold on—gotta grab something.” She turns to me as if to say, Is he talking to me? He’s already gone, though, his footsteps thumping up the stairs. At the table, Hannah runs a hand through her hair and gives me a pleading look. “Just remember he’s your best friend, okay?” That doesn’t sound ominous. When Garrett returns, he’s holding a notepad and a ballpoint pen, which he sets on the table as he sits across from Sabrina. “Tuck,” he says. “Sit. This is important.” I’m so baffled right now. Hannah’s resigned expression doesn’t help in lessening the confusion. Once I’m seated next to Sabrina, Garrett flips open the notepad, all business. “Okay. So let’s go over the names.” Sabrina raises an eyebrow at me. I shrug, because I legitimately don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. “I’ve put together a solid list. I really think you’re going to like these.” But when he glances down at the page, his face falls. “Ah crap. We can’t use any of the boy names.” “Wait.” Sabrina holds up a hand, her brow furrowed. “You’re picking names for our baby?” He nods, busy flipping the page. My baby mama gapes at me. I shrug again. “Just out of curiosity, what were the boy names?” Grace hedges, clearly fighting a smile. He cheers up again. “Well, the top contender was Garrett.” I snicker loud enough to rattle Sabrina’s water glass. “Uh-huh,” I say, playing along. “And what was the runner-up?” “Graham.” Hannah sighs. “But it’s okay. I have some kickass girl names too.” He taps his pen on the pad, meets our eyes, and utters two syllables. “Gigi.” My jaw drops. “Are you kidding me? I’m not naming my daughter Gigi.” Sabrina is mystified. “Why Gigi?” she asks slowly. Hannah sighs again. The name suddenly clicks in my head. Oh for fuck’s sake. “G.G.,” I mutter to Sabrina. “As in Garrett Graham.” She’s silent for a beat. Then she bursts out laughing, triggering giggles from Grace and eventually Hannah, who keeps shaking her head at her boyfriend. “What?” Garrett says defensively. “The godfather should have a say in the name. It’s in the rule book.” “What rule book?” Hannah bursts out. “You make up the rules as you go along!” “So?

What I've learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head. First there's the vinegar-lipped Reader Lady, who says primly, "Well, that's not very interesting, is it?" And there's the emaciated German male who writes these Orwellian memos detailing your thought crimes. And there are your parents, agonizing over your lack of loyalty and discretion; and there's William Burroughs, dozing off or shooting up because he finds you as bold and articulate as a houseplant; and so on. And there are also the dogs: let's not forget the dogs, the dogs in their pen who will surely hurtle and snarl their way out if you ever stop writing, because writing is, for some of us, the latch that keeps the door of the pen closed, keeps those crazy ravenous dogs contained.

Really, Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy... Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that dis-empowers them or one that can literally save their lives.... gone through many different phases of Destines and that's what made me to pen down... hope it won't screw-up me again.... Something beyond love...

Writers, in essence, are professional word tamers; if the words walking down the lines were living creatures, they would surely fear and hate the pen’s nib as tamed animals do the raised whip.

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. Just as I believe that a painter cannot sit down to his morning coffee without noticing what color it is, so a writer cannot see an odd little gesture without putting a verbal description to it, and ought never to let a moment go by undescribed.

So that night after Wyatt goes to bed, I can't sleep. And I see this piece of paper with this song he's writing and it's clearly about me. It says something about a redhead and mentioned the hoop earrings that I was wearing all the time. And then he had this chorous about me having a big heart but no love in it. I kept looking at the words, thinking, This isn't right. He didn't understand me at all. So I thought about it for a little while and got out a pen and paper. I wrote some things down. When he woke up, I said, "Your chorus should be more like 'Big eyes, big soul/big heart, no control/but all she got to give is tiny love.'" Wyatt grabbed a pen and paper and he said, "Say that again?" I said, "It was just an example. Write your own goddamn song." Simone: "Tiny Love"was the Breeze's biggest hit. And Wyatt pretended he wrote the whole thing.

Strange as it may seem, within plain sight of this same house, looking down from its commanding height upon it, was the Capitol. The voices of patriotic representatives boasting of freedom and equality, and the rattling of the poor slave's chains, almost commingled. A slave pen within the very shadow of the Capitol!

I wander now, lost among the shelves. My hand cramps around the pen. I gather dust. But someone has to set down the words, put them in the proper order. I am the library and the librarian, hoarding lives, a catalog for the faithful. Erase my name. Indelible is a word for stories.

Ellysetta was sitting at the secretary in Rain's suite, penning a note to her parents, when Bel burst through the doors. The other members of the quintet followed so swiftly that all five warriors nearly ended up in a heap on the floor. They were breathless and flushed, perspiration trickling down the sides of their faces. Kieran bent over, hands on his knees, and dragged air into his lungs. "Well done,brothers. We beat the smug chervil.” "You all look like you could use a drink." Cool and unwinded, Gaelen smiled at the new arrivals from the sofa near the window. "Water? Or perhaps something a little stronger to help you regain your strength?

It was 9:30 P.M., just an hour from deadline for the second edition. Woodward began typing: A $25,000 cashier's check, apparently earmarked for the campaign chest of President Nixon, was deposited in April in the bank account of Bernard L. Barker, one of the five men arrested at the break-in and alleged bugging attempt at Democratic National Committee headquarters here June 17. The last page of copy was passed to Sussman just at the deadline. Sussman set his pen and pipe down on his desk and turned to Woodward. 'We've never had a story like this,' he said. 'Just never.' -- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward

Once upon a time,” Nora said, as she fluttered a series of kisses over his shoulders that sent every nerve in his body reeling, “a very poor girl from a fucked-up family became a famous writer with a wicked pen and an even more wicked tongue who made seven figures a year. And she went everywhere she wanted to and did everything she wanted to. And nobody ever tried to stop her. And she had her own pet Angel who needed to learn how to talk. So guess what she did?” “What?” Michael asked. He laughed in surprise as Nora slammed him down onto his back and slid on top of him. She brought her mouth onto his and forced his lips apart. “She gave him her tongue.

The important things in life always happened by accident. At fifteen she didn’t know much, in fact, with each passing year she was a lot less clear about most things. But this much she did know. You could worry yourself sick trying to be a better person, spend a thousand sleepless nights figuring out how to live clean and decent and honest, you could make a plan and bolt it in place, kneel by your bed every night and swear to God you’d stick to it, hell, you could go to church and promise properly. You could cross your heart seven times with your eyes tight shut, cut your thumb and squeeze it and pen solemn vows on a rock with your own blood then throw it in the river at the stroke of midnight. And then, out of the black beyond, like a hawk on a rat, some nameless catastrophe would swoop into your life and turn everything upside down and inside out forever.

If you imagine that you will be able to achieve your ideal by ingeniously planning out a timetable with a pen on a piece of paper, you had better give up hope at once.If you are not prepared for discouragements and disillusions; if you will not be content with a small result for a big effort, then do not begin. Lie down again and resume the uneasy doze which you call your existence.

She wrote poetry constantly; that was her "work". She was a slow bleeder and she slaved over it for long, exhausting hours, and many a middle of a night I could hear her creaking around the dead house with a pen in one hand, a clipboard and a flashlight in the other, refining her poems, jotting down the lines of a conceit. Writing never came easy for her; it gave her calluses. She never courted the muses, she wrestled them, mauled them all over the house and came up, after weeks of peripatetic labor, with a slim Spencerian sonnet, fourteen lines of imagistic jabberwocky.

In summer, when the days are long, Perhaps you'll understand the song: In Autumn, when the leaves are brown, Take pen and ink, and write it down.

In politics, the pen is at its heaviest because it is weighed down by the collective responsibility it holds towards its people and their future in the eyes of the world.

the only way I can remember what happened is if i sit down & pray to the paper & hope the pen is a believer.- to make up for the fact that i'm not.

WONDER WITHOUT WILLPOWER Love’s way becomes a pen sometimes writing g-sounds like gold or r-sounds like tomorrow in different calligraphy styles sliding by, darkening the paper Now it’s held upside down, now beside the head, now down and on to something else, figuring. One sentence saves an illustrious man from disaster, but fame does not matter to the split tongue of a pen. Hippocrates knows how the cure must go. His pen does not. This one I am calling pen, or sometimes flag, has no mind. You, the pen, are most sanely insane. You cannot be spoken of rationally. Opposites are drawn into your presence but not to be resolved. You are not whole or ever complete. You are the wonder without willpower going where you want.

Anyone who has ever tried to write a novel knows what an arduous task it is, undoubtedly one of the worst ways of occupying oneself. You have to remain within yourself all the time, in solitary confinement. It's a controlled psychosis, an obsessive paranoia manacled to work completely lacking in the feather pens and bustles and Venetian masks we would ordinarily associate with it, clothed instead in a butcher's apron and rubber boots, eviscerating knife in hand. You can only barely see from that writerly cellar the feet of passers-by, hear the rapping of their heels. Every so often someone stops and bends down and glances in through the window, and then you get a glimpse of a human face, maybe even exchange a few words. But ultimately the mind is so occupied with its own act, a play staged by the self ofr the self in a hasty, makeshift cabinet of curiosities peopled by author and character, narrator and reader, the person describing and the person described, that feet, shoes, heels, and faces become, sooner or later, mere components of that act.

A plane flies overhead and inside it is a writer who has spent most of his life as a law clerk, even though he’s always known deep down that he’s a writer. For the first time, he’s worked out what he wants to write, what the truth really is. He begs a napkin and a pen off the air hostess and he writes down the most beautiful sentence ever written, as the engine catches fire outside and the plane starts its plummet to the ground. It doesn’t matter to him. It’s the only sentence he’s ever written and it is the last and no part of him cares. The sentence falls through the air with singed, black edges and comes to rest in a tree, in a park, miles away. One day, around ten years from now, an old widow of an astronaut will find it when a strong breeze finally blows it from its hiding place. She will read it and she will weep.

I hang up and don’t even need to look at Joshua. I know he’s shaking his head. After a few minutes I glance at him, and he is staring at me. Imagine it’s two minutes before the biggest interview of your life, and you look down at your white shirt. Your peacock-blue fountain pen has leaked through your pocket. Your head explodes with an obscenity and your stomach is a spike of panic over the simmering nerves. You’re an idiot and everything’s ruined. That’s the exact color of Joshua’s eyes when he looks at me.

He tries again, swallowing hard to ease away the painful lump in his throat. "It's just important. I love you. I'm yours. I need people to know." "Alright," Lindsay says suddenly. He leans down to grab at Pip's bag, throwing stuff out onto the carpet, his iPod and phone and wallet and gloves and Attitude magazine until he finds what he's looking for, a green marker pen, and holds it between his teeth while he starts tugging at the hem of Pip's t-shirt. Pip's too surprised to do anything but submit, he lets Lindsay peel off his t-shirt and throw that on top of all the things from his bag then just watches as Lindsay pulls the pen out of the cap in his mouth and signs his name in big green letters on the side of Pip's stomach. He holds his breath, trying not to suck in the belly fat everybody else keeps telling him is imaginary. "There, you're mine, are you fucking happy now?" Lindsay snaps, and throws the recapped pen across the room to get lost in the bookcase somewhere.

And then she looked up and saw Flush. Something unusual in his look must have struck her. She paused. She laid down her pen. Once he had roused her with a kiss, and she thought that he was Pan. He had eaten chicken and rice pudding soaked in cream. He had given up the sunshine for her sake. She called him to her and said she forgave him.

I love you,” I whispered into his suit. My words had life, and weight, and a pulse. I said them again. “I love you, Dad. I love you. I love you. I love you.” He lifted me up like I was a little girl, spinning me in place and burying his nose in my hair. Tears rolled down our faces. The pen bled the last of its ink, marking this page in our lives forever in my father’s office. I knew, with certainty that made my heart swell, that he was not going to replace that carpet. He was going to look at it every day, remember the day it had happened, and cherish it. “I love you, too, baby girl.

I remember coming to in white room, with white walls, and people all around me covered in white sheets and thinking, F**k, I’m in the morgue. Then I heard a hissing noise next to my bed. Pssst, pssst. I looked down and there was this kid holding up a pen and a copy of „Bark at the Moon“. ‘Will you sign this for me?’ he asked. ‘F**k off,’ I told him. ‘I’m dead.’

This time they picked up their hand luggage and moved away from their son, following Lieges towards the air-van. But instead of changing his stance, Alain Pen just dug in hull-down. “They won’t go without me,” he told Morley confidently. “So what are you really up to, eh? I know we’re not going to Bull Crater on holiday.” “You’ve got a vivid imagination, kid.” “Stop calling me kid,” Alain objected. “I know something’s going on and I’ve reported it to my section leader.

You just finished a job, as you refer to it. You must be tired and I can only imagine the enervating quality of an added threat of the state pen." "California's state pen is Fisher," Cat said. "It can write upside down, but I think a pencil works better for that.

You wanna know why the world is f**ked? This is why, this is exactly why…right here. Get a pen, write this down, this is important…The world is f**ked up because I eat WonderBread preserved with formaldehyde that lasts three weeks and will never grow mold as long as it’s kept in its magic silver bag. The world is f**ked up because I know my cans of tuna have mercury in it. The world is f**ked up because I know my flake light tuna and WonderBread are poisonous, yet I still eat them!

He tore it out and sat down to write a message. Pen was almost to paper when he stalled, as if he'd had the perfect thing to say but it floated out of his mind like vanished smoke. Sighing, he itched with irritation.

By what I have read in books, I think few that have held a pen were ever really wearied, or they would write of it more strongly. I had no care of my life, neither past nor future, and I scarce remembered there was such a lad as David Balfour. I did not think of myself, but just of each fresh step which I was sure would be my last, with despair—and of Alan, who was the cause of it, with hatred. Alan was in the right trade as a soldier; this is the officer's part to make men continue to do things, they know not wherefore, and when, if the choice was offered, they would lie down where they were and be killed. And I dare say I would have made a good enough private; for in these last hours it never occurred to me that I had any choice but just to obey as long as I was able, and die obeying.

I'll be fine ' Pen told me a little curtly. 'Where are you going anyway ' 'The United States. Alabama.' 'Looking for a change of scene ' 'Looking for a dead woman.' 'Get Jenna-Jane Mulbridge to come down here and I'll make you one.

Half an hour from now, when I shall again and for ever reindue that hated personality, I know how I shall sit shuddering and weeping in my chair, or continue, with the most strained and fear-struck ecstasy of listening, to pace up and down this room (my last earthly refuge) and give ear to every sound of menace. Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? or will he find the courage to release himself at the last moment? God knows; I am careless; this is my true hour of death, and what is to follow concerns another than myself. Here, then, as I lay down the pen, and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.

The truth is that I can’t put down my pen: I think I’m going to have the Nausea and I feel as though I’m delaying it while writing. So I write whatever comes into my mind.

Writing things down with a pen is a lot faster and more therapeutic than trying to type something on a tiny touchscreen keyboard.

Celebrate your day of birthday as special day.Make a specific birthday wishes and write it down.You will be amazed about the power of pen and inner strength to accomplish the wishes. This will be a special gift for yourself on each birthday.

We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours forever—the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass. All this happened so long ago. And I never returned, never wrote, never met anyone who might have given me news of Oxgody. So, in memory, it stays as I left it, a sealed room furnished by the past, airless, still, ink long dry on a put-down pen. But this was something I knew nothing of as I closed the gate and set off across the meadow.

It is much, much worse to receive bad news through the written word than by somebody simply telling you, and I’m sure you understand why. When somebody simply tells you bad news, you hear it once, and that’s the end of it. But when bad news is written down, whether in a letter or a newspaper or on your arm in felt tip pen, each time you read it, you feel as if you are receiving the news again and again. For instance, I once loved a woman, who for various reasons could not marry me. If she had simply told me in person, I would have been very sad, of course, but eventually it might have passed. However, she chose instead to write a two-hundred-page book, explaining every single detail of the bad news at great length, and instead my sadness has been of impossible depth. When the book was first brought to me, by a flock of carrier pigeons, I stayed up all night reading it, and I read it still, over and over, and it is as if my darling Beatrice is bringing me bad news every day and every night of my life. The Baudelaire orphans

What rhymes with insensitive?” I tap my pen on the kitchen table, beyond frustrated with my current task. Who knew rhyming was so fucking difficult? Garrett, who’s dicing onions at the counter, glances over. “Sensitive,” he says helpfully. “Yes, G, I’ll be sure to rhyme insensitive with sensitive. Gold star for you.” On the other side of the kitchen, Tucker finishes loading the dishwasher and turns to frown at me. “What the hell are you doing over there, anyway? You’ve been scribbling on that notepad for the past hour.” “I’m writing a love poem,” I answer without thinking. Then I slam my lips together, realizing what I’ve done. Dead silence crashes over the kitchen. Garrett and Tucker exchange a look. An extremely long look. Then, perfectly synchronized, their heads shift in my direction, and they stare at me as if I’ve just escaped from a mental institution. I may as well have. There’s no other reason for why I’m voluntarily writing poetry right now. And that’s not even the craziest item on Grace’s list. That’s right. I said it. List. The little brat texted me not one, not two, but six tasks to complete before she agrees to a date. Or maybe gestures is a better way to phrase it... “I just have one question,” Garrett starts. “Really?” Tuck says. “Because I have many.” Sighing, I put my pen down. “Go ahead. Get it out of your systems.” Garrett crosses his arms. “This is for a chick, right? Because if you’re doing it for funsies, then that’s just plain weird.” “It’s for Grace,” I reply through clenched teeth. My best friend nods solemnly. Then he keels over. Asshole. I scowl as he clutches his side, his broad back shuddering with each bellowing laugh. And even while racked with laughter, he manages to pull his phone from his pocket and start typing. “What are you doing?” I demand. “Texting Wellsy. She needs to know this.” “I hate you.” I’m so busy glaring at Garrett that I don’t notice what Tucker’s up to until it’s too late. He snatches the notepad from the table, studies it, and hoots loudly. “Holy shit. G, he rhymed jackass with Cutlass.” “Cutlass?” Garrett wheezes. “Like the sword?” “The car,” I mutter. “I was comparing her lips to this cherry-red Cutlass I fixed up when I was a kid. Drawing on my own experience, that kind of thing.” Tucker shakes his head in exasperation. “You should have compared them to cherries, dumbass.” He’s right. I should have. I’m a terrible poet and I do know it. “Hey,” I say as inspiration strikes. “What if I steal the words to “Amazing Grace”? I can change it to…um…Terrific Grace.” “Yup,” Garrett cracks. “Pure gold right there. Terrific Grace.” I ponder the next line. “How sweet…” “Your ass,” Tucker supplies. Garrett snorts. “Brilliant minds at work. Terrific Grace, how sweet your ass.” He types on his phone again. “Jesus Christ, will you quit dictating this conversation to Hannah?” I grumble. “Bros before hos, dude.” “Call my girlfriend a ho one more time and you won’t have a bro.” Tucker chuckles. “Seriously, why are you writing poetry for this chick?” “Because I’m trying to win her back. This is one of her requirements.” That gets Garrett’s attention. He perks up, phone poised in hand as he asks, “What are the other ones?” “None of your fucking business.” “Golly gee, if you do half as good a job on those as you’re doing with this epic poem, then you’ll get her back in no time!” I give him the finger. “Sarcasm not appreciated.” Then I swipe the notepad from Tuck’s hand and head for the doorway. “PS? Next time either of you need to score points with your ladies? Don’t ask me for help. Jackasses.” Their wild laughter follows me all the way upstairs. I duck into my room and kick the door shut, then spend the next hour typing up the sorriest excuse for poetry on my laptop. Jesus. I’m putting more effort into this damn poem than for my actual classes.

I have loved you with both Hands tied behind my back Bound with pen and ink Paper and words Sealed with someone else’s name until this moment in which I am nothing but a man who loves a woman. There is nothing left to say Except to give all of my heart For you

He noticed that she threw away the crumbled bus ticket on the street as soon as she got down. He picked it up and put it in his pocket along with his own a memorabilia of their first date together, just like a strand of her hair he would find later on his shirt and the broken pen cap that she would go on to search in the laboratory and so many other such small things which he would collect.

Twenty candles on a cake. Twenty Camels in a pack. Twenty months in the federal pen. Twenty shots of tequila down a young girl’s gullet. Twenty centuries since Our Lord’s last pratfall, and after all that time we still don’t know where passion goes when it goes.

Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17—, and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof. I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow—a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards:

There are thousands and thousands of deer here. Soon it will be hunting season. “At least most people who hunt up here hunt for food, not sport,” she says. I watch them bound away as we turn down her dirt road. “Why don’t they farm deer?” I wonder. “Is it because they are too pretty?” She shakes her head. “It’s because they panic when penned.

A rich man’s body is like a premium cotton pillow, white and soft and blank. Ours are different. My father’s spine was a knotted rope, the kind that women use in villages to pull water from wells; the clavicle curved around his neck in high relief, like a dog’s collar; cuts and knicks and scars, like little whip marks in his flesh, ran down his chest and waist, reaching down below his hip bones into his buttocks. The story of a poor man’s life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.

A man in a topiary maze cannot judge of the twistings and turnings, and which avenue might lead him to the heart; while one who stands above, on some pleasant prospect, looking down upon the labyrinth, is reduced to watching the bewildered circumnavigations of the tiny victim through obvious coils - as the gods, perhaps, looked down on besieged and blood-sprayed Troy from the safety of their couches, and thought mortals weak and foolish while they themselves reclined in comfort, and had only to snap to call Ganymade to theeir side with nectar decanted. So I, now, with the vantage of my years, am sensible of my foolishness, my blindness, as a child. I cannot think of my blunders without a shriveling of the inward parts - not merely the disiccation attendant on shame, but also the aggravation of remorse that I did not demand explanation, that I did not sooner take my mother by the hand, and- I do not know what I regret. I sit with my pen, and cannot find an end to that sentence.

here’s my 8-step process for maximizing efficacy (doing the right things): Wake up at least 1 hour before you have to be at a computer screen. Email is the mind-killer. Make a cup of tea (I like pu-erh) and sit down with a pen/pencil and paper. Write down the 3 to 5 things—and no more—that are making you the most anxious or uncomfortable. They’re often things that have been punted from one day’s to-do list to the next, to the next, to the next, and so on. Most important usually equals most uncomfortable, with some chance of rejection or conflict. For each item, ask yourself: “If this were the only thing I accomplished today, would I be satisfied with my day?” “Will moving this forward make all the other to-dos unimportant or easier to knock off later?” Put another way: “What, if done, will make all of the rest easier or irrelevant?” Look only at the items you’ve answered “yes” to for at least one of these questions. Block out at 2 to 3 hours to focus on ONE of them for today. Let the rest of the urgent but less important stuff slide. It will still be there tomorrow. TO BE CLEAR: Block out at 2 to 3 HOURS to focus on ONE of them for today. This is ONE BLOCK OF TIME. Cobbling together 10 minutes here and there to add up to 120 minutes does not work. No phone calls or social media allowed. If you get distracted or start procrastinating, don’t freak out and downward-spiral; just gently come back to your ONE to-do.

Writing hasn’t changed a thing; when the writer puts down the pen, no matter how lucid or brutally honest his insights may have been, it is back to business as usual, which means, in this case, shooting up. This is depressing, but its honesty heartens me. It disallows the delusion that the act of writing necessarily connects us to humanity, that it will help us quit noxious substances, that it will restore us to love lost, or at least serve as a consolation. Literature is not, after all, self-help.

Chronicler wiped the nib of his pen clean, “It’s not really my place to comment on the story,” he said placidly. “If you say you saw a dragon…” He shrugged. Kvothe gave him a profoundly disappointed look. “This from the author of The Mating Habits of the Common Draccus? This from Devan Lochees, the great debunker?” “This from Devan Lochees who agreed not to interrupt or change a single word of the story he is recording.” Chronicler lay his pen down and massaged his hand. “Because those were the only conditions under which he could get access to a story he very much desired.

I hear it still. As I lay down my pen and take to my bed, I am aware of the bow being drawn across the bridge and the music rises into the night sky. It is far away and barely audible - but there it is! A pizzicato. Then a tremelo. The style is unmistakable. It is Sherlock Holmes who is playing. It must be. I hope with all my heart that he is playing for me . . .

Go ahead and eat while I take a shower. I left a pen and paper on the table. Your homework for today is to write down all the things you'd do if there were no consequences." "Why should I do that?" she asked belligerently. "Because I said so and I'm the boss." (...) After my shower, I found Gianna sitting on the couch with an amused, self-satisifed look on her face. I sauntered over to the dining room table to read her list. 1. Punch Caleb in the face. 2. Steal Caleb's car and go for a joy ride, which may involve crashing into a brick wall. 3. Find a way to get Caleb expelled from my school, so he'll have to live somewhere else. I glanced up at Gianna to take in the smug grin on her face. "What?" she asked innocently.

Still here?” he drawls when he notices me. “Still a presumptuous asshole?” I snap back. I expect him to double down on the nasty replies, to crush me with spite, so you can imagine my surprise when he clamps his mouth shut, the corners of his lips twitching into a small smile. His pale eyes rake over my face for a second too long, and I squirm under his undivided attention. Why, oh why, does he have to look like that? Low blow, Life, low blow.

With the air of long practice, Holmes waited until Milo raised his mug to his lips, and then reached up to whack his elbow. Coffee splattered down his front. She smiled her black-cat smile. "When we're finished here, I'll fetch you a bleach pen and a new shirt," Peterson said to a sputtering Milo.

My delightful, my love, my life, I don’t understand anything: how can you not be with me? I’m so infinitely used to you that I now feel myself lost and empty: without you, my soul. You turn my life into something light, amazing, rainbowed—you put a glint of happiness on everything—always different: sometimes you can be smoky-pink, downy, sometimes dark, winged—and I don’t know when I love your eyes more—when they are open or shut. It’s eleven p.m. now: I’m trying with all the force of my soul to see you through space; my thoughts plead for a heavenly visa to Berlin via air . . . My sweet excitement . . . Today I can’t write about anything except my longing for you. I’m gloomy and fearful: silly thoughts are swarming—that you’ll stumble as you jump out of a carriage in the underground, or that someone will bump into you in the street . . . I don’t know how I’ll survive the week. My tenderness, my happiness, what words can I write for you? How strange that although my life’s work is moving a pen over paper, I don’t know how to tell you how I love, how I desire you. Such agitation—and such divine peace: melting clouds immersed in sunshine—mounds of happiness. And I am floating with you, in you, aflame and melting—and a whole life with you is like the movement of clouds, their airy, quiet falls, their lightness and smoothness, and the heavenly variety of outline and tint—my inexplicable love. I cannot express these cirrus-cumulus sensations. When you and I were at the cemetery last time, I felt it so piercingly and clearly: you know it all, you know what will happen after death—you know it absolutely simply and calmly—as a bird knows that, fluttering from a branch, it will fly and not fall down . . . And that’s why I am so happy with you, my lovely, my little one. And here’s more: you and I are so special; the miracles we know, no one knows, and no one loves the way we love. What are you doing now? For some reason I think you’re in the study: you’ve got up, walked to the door, you are pulling the door wings together and pausing for a moment—waiting to see if they’ll move apart again. I’m tired, I’m terribly tired, good night, my joy. Tomorrow I’ll write you about all kinds of everyday things. My love.

If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name

So long as we have wage slavery," answered Schliemann, "it matters not in the least how debasing and repulsive a task may be, it is easy to find people to perform it. But just as soon as labor is set free, then the price of such work will begin to rise. So one by one the old, dingy, and unsanitary factories will come down— it will be cheaper to build new; and so the steamships will be provided with stoking machinery , and so the dangerous trades will be made safe, or substitutes will be found for their products. In exactly the same way, as the citizens of our Industrial Republic become refined, year by year the cost of slaughterhouse products will increase; until eventually those who want to eat meat will have to do their own killing— and how long do you think the custom would survive then?— To go on to another item— one of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political corruption; and one of the consequences of civic administration by ignorant and vicious politicians, is that preventable diseases kill off half our population. And even if science were allowed to try, it could do little, because the majority of human beings are not yet human beings at all, but simply machines for the creating of wealth for others. They are penned up in filthy houses and left to rot and stew in misery, and the conditions of their life make them ill faster than all the doctors in the world could heal them; and so, of course, they remain as centers of contagion , poisoning the lives of all of us, and making happiness impossible for even the most selfish. For this reason I would seriously maintain that all the medical and surgical discoveries that science can make in the future will be of less importance than the application of the knowledge we already possess, when the disinherited of the earth have established their right to a human existence.

There’s a Lady Amelia Pembroke here to see you, my lord. She was most insistent.” Benedict glanced up from his desk. “I trust you informed her that I was not receiving, and refused to let her in?” “Of course.” The butler hesitated before continuing, “She said she would simply wait until you are receiving.” Benedict put down his pen. “Wait where, pray?” “Upon the front step, my lord. I’m afraid the lady brought... the lady brought... a book. She cannot be budged.

She was extending a hand that I didn't know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence, she said, 'You don't want to talk to me, do you?' I took my daybook out my knapsack and found the next blank page, the second to last. 'I don't speak,' I wrote. 'I'm sorry.' She looked at the piece of paper, then at me, then back at the piece of paper, she covered her eyes with her hands and cried, tears seeped between her fingers and collected in the little webs, she cried and cried and cried, there weren't any napkins nearby, so I ripped the page from the back-'I don't speak. I'm sorry.'-and used it to dry her cheeks, my explanation and apology ran down her face like mascara, she took my pen from me and wrote on the next blank page of my daybook, the final one: Please marry me.

It is much, much worse to receive bad news through the written word than by somebody simply telling you, and I’m sure you understand why. When somebody simply tells you bad news, you hear it once, and that’s the end of it. But when bad news is written down, whether in a letter or a newspaper or on your arm in felt tip pen, each time you read it, you feel as if you are receiving the news again and again.

History, lie of our lives, mire of our loins. Our sins, our souls. Hiss-tih-ree: the tip of the pen taking a trip of three steps (with one glide) down the chronicle to trap a slick, sibilant character. Hiss. (Ss.) Tih. Ree. He was a pig, a plain pig, in the morning, standing five feet ten on one hoof. He was a pig in slacks. He was a pig in school. He was a pig on the dotted line. But in my eyes it’s always the ones signing dotted lines that become pigs. Did this pig have a precursor? He did, indeed he did. In point of fact, dating all the way back to the Biblical Age. Oh where? About everywhere you look there's pigs giving that fancy ol’ snake a chase. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can always count on a fuckin’ pretentious sarcastican for a fancy prose style.

Basically, if you want to become a good writer, you need to do three things: read a lot, listen well and deeply, and write a lot. And don't think too much. Just enter the heat of words and sounds and coloured sensation and keep your pen moving across the page.

Dear Diary, My pen is finally touching your pages. It is time to tell our story. Our story began in China and now it continues in America. I want to write about our old life and I want to write about our life now. I will write it all down with hopes that somehow I can connect the two worlds I have lived in. Right now those worlds seem so far apart.

In the beautiful words of Staton Kirkham Davis, 'You may be keeping accounts, and presently you shall walk out of the door that for so long has seemed to you the barrier of your ideals, and shall find yourself before an audience — the pen still behind your ear, the ink-stains on you fingers — and then and there shall pour out the torrent of your inspiration. You may be driving sheep, and you shall wander to the city — bucolic and open-mouthed; shall wander under the intrepid guidance of a spirit into the studio of the master, and after a time he shall say, 'I have nothing more to teach you.' And now you have become the master, who did so recently dream of great things while driving sheep. You shall lay down the saw and the plane to take upon yourself the regeneration of the world.

He reaches for his pen. He yawns and puts it down and picks it up again. I shall be found dead at my desk, he thinks, like the poet Petrarch. The poet wrote many unsent letters: he wrote to Cicero, who died twelve hundred years before he was born. He wrote to Homer, who possibly never even existed; but I, I have enough to do with Lord Lisle, and the fish traps, and the Emperor's galleons tossing on the Middle Sea. Between one dip of the pen, Petrarch writes, 'between one dip of the pen and the next, the time passes: and I hurry, I drive myself, and I speed towards death. We are always dying - I while I write, you while you read, and others while they listen or block their ears; they are all dying.

Panic strikes me when I think about a sentence that isn’t given the chance to live because I don’t have a pen in my hand or am not sitting near enough to someone familiar to speak it to. Especially if it’s a particularly good sentence, a sentence with truth or beauty or humor or sadness to it. The best ones always take you by surprise. They sneak into your head while you’re walking down the aisles at a supermarket, or flat-out assault you when you’re at your grandmother’s funeral, and you have to scramble to give the thought life before it’s gone forever. Cocktail napkins, palms, text messages sent to yourself.

Piping down the valleys wild Piping songs of pleasant glee On a cloud I saw a child. And he laughing said to me. Pipe a song about a Lamb; So I piped with merry chear, Piper pipe that song again— So I piped, he wept to hear. Drop thy pipe thy happy pipe Sing thy songs of happy chear, So I sung the same again While he wept with joy to hear Piper sit thee down and write In a book that all may read— So he vanish'd from my sight. And I pluck'd a hollow reed. And I made a rural pen, And I stain'd the water clear, And I wrote my happy songs Every child may joy to hear. - "Introduction to the Songs of Innocence

I felt let down when I could see the writer too much at work on a character because it reminded me forcefully that of course I don't have a writer working on my story, guiding me to safety, bending the laws of reality for me, bringing me in a hero to rescue me or transporting me to a happier life by the stroke of her pen. No writer is writing me a better journey. No writer is guiding me through my misunderstandings and muddles and wrong turns to reach my happy ending. And then I realize I am the writer. ...we all write out our own lives.

Take a piece of paper and a pen, and write down everything you aren’t happy with. Write down, very specifically, every single problem you face. If you are struggling with finances, you need a very clear picture of what’s wrong. Write down every debt, every bill, every asset, and every bit of income. If you are struggling with self-image, write down exactly what you dislike about yourself. If it is anxiety, write down everything that bothers or upsets you.

Words... are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind....Thus to lay down any laws for such irreclaimable vagabonds is worse than useless. A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling are all the constraint we can put on them. All we can say about them, as we peer at them over the edge of that deep, dark and only fitfully illuminated cavern in which they live — the mind — all we can say about them is that they seem to like people to think and to feel before they use them, but to think and to feel not about them, but about something different. They are highly sensitive, easily made self-conscious. They do not like to have their purity or their impurity discussed......Nor do they like being lifted out on the point of a pen and examined separately. They hang together, in sentences, in paragraphs, sometimes for whole pages at a time. They hate being useful; they hate making money; they hate being lectured about in public. In short, they hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change.

every time I picked up a pen, this grinding, unnamed fear overcame me—later identified as fear that my real self would spill out. One can’t mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit. What I needed to write kept simmering up while I wrote down everything but that. In fact, I kept ginning out reasons that writing reality was impossible. I cranked up therapy and drank like a fish.

I've always known that the best part of writing occurs before you've picked up a pen. When a story exists only in your mind, its potential is infinite; it's only when you start pinning words to paper that it becomes less than perfect. You have to make your choices, set your limits. Start whittling away at the cosmos, and don't stop until you've narrowed it down to a single, ordinary speck of dirt. And in the end, what you've made is not nearly as glorious as what you've thrown away.

Put down the pen someone else gave you. No one ever drafted a life worth living on borrowed ink. Get to San Francisco. Get to San Francisco in defiance of your geography, your ancestry and the lonely change rattling sad excuses in your pocket. Fuel up on pie and diner coffee and mystic visions and the freedom of not knowing what’s coming next except that you’re burning the road to outrun it.

Rolfe’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Why?” “You’ll have to clarify that.” He took a breath. “Why go to so much trouble for slaves?” “Because if we don’t fight for them, who will?” She pulled a fountain pen from her pocket. “Sign the papers.” Rolfe raised an eyebrow. “And how will you know that I’m holding true to my word?” She removed the dagger from his throat, using the blade to brush back a strand of his dark hair. “I have my sources. And if I hear that you’re trading slaves, no matter where you go, no matter how far you run, I will hunt you down. That’s twice now I’ve disabled you. The third time, you won’t be so lucky. I swear that on my name. I’m almost seventeen, and I can already wallop you; imagine how good I’ll be in a few years.” She shook her head. “I don’t think you’ll want to try me now—and certainly not then.” Rolfe stared at her for a few heartbeats. “If you ever set foot in my territory again, your life is forfeit.” He paused, then muttered, “May the gods help Arobynn.” He took the pen. “Any other requests?” She eased off him, but kept the dagger in her hand. “Why, yes,” she said. “A ship would be nice.” Rolfe only glared at her before he grabbed the documents.

How can man know himself? It is a dark, mysterious business: if a hare has seven skins, a man may skin himself seventy times seven times without being able to say, “Now that is truly you; that is no longer your outside.” It is also an agonizing, hazardous undertaking thus to dig into oneself, to climb down toughly and directly into the tunnels of one’s being. How easy it is thereby to give oneself such injuries as no doctor can heal. Moreover, why should it even be necessary given that everything bears witness to our being — our friendships and animosities, our glances and handshakes, our memories and all that we forget, our books as well as our pens. For the most important inquiry, however, there is a method. Let the young soul survey its own life with a view of the following question: “What have you truly loved thus far? What has ever uplifted your soul, what has dominated and delighted it at the same time?” Assemble these revered objects in a row before you and perhaps they will reveal a law by their nature and their order: the fundamental law of your very self. Compare these objects, see how they complement, enlarge, outdo, transfigure one another; how they form a ladder on whose steps you have been climbing up to yourself so far; for your true self does not lie buried deep within you, but rather rises immeasurably high above you, or at least above what you commonly take to be your I.

This was too much. “Yes,” she shouted, “but I’m eleven.” “Oh.” He looked somewhat taken aback, standing there with the Monopoly board in his hand. Harriet began to feel sorry for him. “Well,” she said, “shall we play one game?” He looked relieved. He set up the board carefully on the coffee table. Then he went to the desk drawer and got out a notebook and a pen. Then he sat down across from her. Harriet stared at the notebook. “What’s that?” “A notebook.” “I KNOW that,” she shouted. “I just take a few notes now and then. You don’t mind, do you?” “Depends on what they are.” “What do you mean?” “Are they mean, nasty notes, or just ordinary notes?” “Why?” “Well, I just thought I’d warn you. Nasty ones are pretty hard to get by with these days.” “Oh, I see what you mean. Thank you for the advice. No, they’re quite ordinary notes.” “Nobody ever takes it away from you, I bet, do they?” “What do you mean?

Do you always wear Malaysian imitations of Brooks Brothers blue oxford button-downs, Mr. Laney?" Laney had looked down at his shirt, or tried to. "Malaysia?" "The stitch-count's dead on, but they still haven't mastered the thread-tension." "Oh." "Never mind. A little prototypic nerd chic could actually lend a certain frisson, around here. You could lose the tie, though. Definitely lose the tie. And keep a collection of felt-tipped pens in your pocket. Unchewed, please. Plus one of those fat flat highlighters, in a really nasty fluorescent shade." "Are you joking?" "Probably, Mr. Laney. May I call you Colin?" "Yes." She never did call him "Colin," then or ever. "You'll find that humor is essential at Slitscan, Laney. A necessary survival tool. You'll find the type that's most viable here is fairly oblique." "How do you mean, Ms. Torrance?" "Kathy. I mean difficult to quote effectively in a memo. Or a court of law.

So I got my stuff and the girl at the register puts these other things in my bag, too. Little free samples: gum and a comb and a marker pen. So I says to her, 'Look, girlie, I got false teeth and I wear a wig.' So she fishes back in my bag and takes out the comb and the gum. Left the pen in there. Anyways, I went back to the van, even though I knew it was locked. Figured I'd just wait and have a smoke. You can't smoke in the van, see? So while I'm waiting there, minding my own business, this car pulls into the handicapped space right next to us--brand-new car, white and clean, and it's got this bumper sticker on it that says, 'Life Is a Shit Sandwich.' Isn't that stupid? So this guy gets out--good-lookin' fella, in his twenties. I say to him, 'Hey, handsome, tell me something.' He takes a look at my walker and gets all panicky. 'I'm just running in for two seconds,' he says. See, he thinks I'm going to yell at him for parking in a handicapped space, but I ain't. I don't give a rat's ass about that, you see. I'd rather walk the extra ten feet than be called handicapped. Where was I?' She amazed me. 'Life's a shit sandwich,' I said. 'Oh, yeah. Right. So that guy goes runnin' into the store and here's what I did. I fished that free pen out of the bag and marched right over there to that bumper of his. Got myself right down on the ground--and I wrote--just after the 'Life's a shit sandwich' part--I wrote, 'But only if you're a shithead.' 'Course, then I couldn't get myself back up again--had to yell over to a couple of kids at the phone booth to come pick me back up.

But he also knew that, as much as he wanted to aid and console the soldier, he wanted to be alone in his room with the night coming down and a book close by and pen and paper and the knowledge that the door would remain shut until the morning came and he would ne be disturbed. The gap between these two desires filled him with sadness and awe at the mystery of the self, the mystery of having a single consciousness, knowing merely its own bare feelings and experiencing singly and alone it own pain or fear or pleasure or complacency.

I could spell it," I say. "Write it down." He hesitates at this novel idea. Possibly he doesn't remember I can. I've never held a pen or a pencil, in this room, not even to add up the scores. Women can't add, he once said, jokingly. When I asked him what he meant, he said, For them, one and one and one and one don't make four. What

As you know, there are several classes of truth. There are the truths that pour out on confessional blogs and YouTube channels. There are the supposed truths exposed in gossip magazines and on reality television, which everyone knows are just lies in truth clothing. Then there are the truths that show themselves only under ideal circumstances: like when you are talking deep into the night with a friend and you tell each other things you would never say if your defenses weren't broken down by salty snacks, sugary beverages, darkness, and a flood of words. There are the truths found in books or films when some writer puts exactly the right words together and it's like their pen turned sword and pierced you right through the heart. Truths like those are rare and getting rarer.

You do not seem aware, for all of your knowledge of the great world I do not frequent, of the usual response which the productions of the Female Pen--let alone as in our case, the *hypothetick* productions--are greeted with. The best we may hope is--oh, it is excellently done--*for a woman.* And then there are Subjects we may not treat--things we may not know...We are not mere candleholders to virtuous thoughts--mere chalices of Purity--we think and feel, aye and *read*--which seems not to shock *you* in us, in me, though I have concealed from many the extent of my--vicarious--knowledge of human vagaries. Now--if there is a reason for my persistence in this correspondence--it is this very unawareness in you--real or assumed--of what a woman must be supposed to be capable of. This is to me--like a strong Bush, well-rooted is to the grasp of one falling down a precipice--here I hold--here I am stayed--

she’d asked Rex and Leif if she could get in on the drawing contest they were having. They’d given her a skeptical “Um, okay” and told her she’d have to “draw fast ’cause they were almost done.” “That’s not a problem,” Alicia had said, taking a multi-pointed rainbow pen from her pocket and, within minutes, busting out a picture of a smiling girl clutching three human heads in each hand. Rex and Leif had looked down at their own creations—a dragon wearing a beret and a half turtle, half bear, respectively—and realized they’d found a friend even weirder than they were.

and if a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together. Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel–writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding — joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities of the nine–hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens — there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. “I am no novel–reader — I seldom look into novels — Do not imagine that I often read novels — It is really very well for a novel.” Such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss — ?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best–chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name; though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication, of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of taste: the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation which no longer concern anyone living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it.

That person, I can't remember who it was right now, who said the pen was mightier that the sword-I thnk they were wrong. I think the eraser is actually the most powerful tool. I wish there was an eraser that could erase the things a person did. And erase other people. Writing things down doesn't erase anything. What's done is done, and that really sucks.

Your basic-type jailhouse tatt is homemade with sewing needles from the jailhouse canteen and some blue ink from the cartridge of a fountain pen promoted from the breast pocket of an unaltert public defender, is why the jailhouse genre is always the same night-sky blue. The needle is dipped in the ink and jabbed as deep into the tattooee as it can be jabbed without making him recoil and fucking up your aim. Just a plain ultraminimal blue square like Gately's got on his right wrist takes half a day and hundreds of individual jabs. How come the lines are never quite straight and the color's never quite all the way solid is it's impossible to get all the individualized punctures down to the same uniform deepness in the, like, twitching flesh. This is why jailhouse tatts always look like they were done by sadistic children on rainy afternoons.

Oh, how can I put into words the joys of a walk over country such as this; the scenes that delight the eyes, the blessed peace of mind, the sheer exuberance which fills your soul as you tread the firm turf? This is something to be lived, not read about. On these breezy heights, a transformation is wondrously wrought within you. Your thoughts are simple, in tune with your surroundings; the complicated problems you brought with you from the town are smoothed away. Up here, you are near to your Creator; you are conscious of the infinite; you gain new perspectives; thoughts run in new strange channels; there are stirrings in your soul which are quite beyond the power of my pen to describe. Something happens to you in the silent places which never could in the towns, and it is a good thing to sit awhile in a quiet spot and meditate. The hills have a power to soothe and heal which is their very own. No man ever sat alone on the top of a hill and planned a murder or a robbery, and no man ever came down from the hills without feeling in some way refreshed, and the better for his experience.

They that go down to the sea in ships' see strange things, but what they tell is oft-times stranger still. A faculty for romancing is imparted by a seafaring life as readily and surely as a rolling gait and a weather-beaten countenance. A fine imagination is one of the gifts of the ocean-witness the surprising and unlimited power of expression and epithet possessed by the sailor. And a fine imagination will frequently manifest itself in other ways besides swear words. ("The Gorgon's Head")

A hundred words to talk of death? At once too much and not enough. My plans beyond that final breath are currently a little rough. The dying thing comes on so slow: reluctance to get out of bed is magnified each day and so transmuted into dead. I dream of dying all alone, nobody there to watch me pass nothing remains for me to own, no breath remains to fog the glass. And when I do put down my pen my memories will fly like birds. When I am done, when I am dead, And Finished with my hundred words.

He reaches forward slowly, to lift the pen from my lax grip. Wearily I regard the faltering trail of ink it has tracked down my page. I have seen that shape before, I think, but it was not ink then. A trickle of drying blood on the deck of a Red-Ship, and mine the hand that spilled it? Or was it a tendril of smoke rising black against a blue sky as I rode too late to warn a village of a Red-Ship raid? Or poison swirling and unfurling yellowly in a simple glass of water, poison I had handed someone, smiling all the while? The artless curl of a strand of woman's hair left upon my pillow? Or the trail of a man's heels left in the sand as we dragged the bodies from the smoldering tower at Sealbay? The track of a tear down a mother's cheek as she clutched her Forged infant to her despite his angry cries? Like Red-Ships, the memories come without warning, without mercy.

So look," he began, leaning over the desk, "I was—" "Excuse me?" Bethany said. Her voice was loud, even. Wes turned and looked at her. As he did so, I watched his profile, his arm, that little bit of the heart in hand peeking out from his sleeve. "We can help you over here," Bethany said to him. "Did you have a question?" "Um, sort of," Wes said, glancing at me, a mild smile on his face. "But—" "I can answer it," Bethany said solidly, so confidently. Amanda, beside her, nodded, seconding this. "Really, it's fine," he said, then looked at me again. He raised his eyebrows, and I just shrugged. "Okay, so—" "She's only a trainee, she won't know the answer," Bethany told him, pushing her chair over closer to where he was, her voice too loud, bossy even. "It's better if you ask me. Or ask us." Then, and only then, did I see the tiniest flicker of annoyance on Wes's face. "You know," Wes said, "I think she'll know it." "She won't. Ask me." Now it wasn't just a flicker. Wes looked at me, narrowing his eyes, and for a second I just stared back. Whatever happens, I thought, happens. For the first time, time at the info desk was flying. "Okay," he said slowly, moving down the counter. He leaned on his elbows, closer to Bethany, and she sat up even straighter, readying herself, like someone onJeopardy awaiting the Daily Double. "So here's my question." Amanda picked up a pen, as if there might be a written portion. "Last night," Wes said, his voice serious, "when the supplies were being packed up, what happened to the big tongs?" The sick part was that Bethany, for a second, looked as if she was actually flipping through her mental Rolodex for the answer. I watched her swallow, then purse her lips. "Well," she said. But that was all. I could feel myself smiling. A real smile. Wes looked at Amanda. "Do you know?" Amanda shook her head slowly. "All right," he said, turning back to look at me. "Better ask the trainee, then. Macy?" I could feel Amanda and Bethany looking at me. "They're in the bottom of that cart with the broken back wheel, under the aprons," I said. "There wasn't room for them with the other serving stuff.

He takes my right hand and places it palm down on his chest. Then he traces around it with the pen, craning his neck to see, giving himself double chins. 'What are you doing?' He shifts my hand away and starts scratching out letters on his skin. 'I worked out a tattoo - if I had one.' I look at what he's done. He's got the outline of my hand over his heart and in it he's written, Her.

I will love you with no regard to the actions of our enemies or the jealousies of actors. I will love you with no regard to the outrage of certain parents or the boredom of certain friends. I will love you no matter what is served in the world’s cafeterias or what game is played at each and every recess. I will love you no matter how many fire drills we are all forced to endure, and no matter what is drawn upon the blackboard in a blurring, boring chalk. I will love you no matter how many mistakes I make when trying to reduce fractions, and no matter how difficult it is to memorize the periodic table. I will love you no matter what your locker combination was, or how you decided to spend your time during study hall. I will love you no matter how your soccer team performed in the tournament or how many stains I received on my cheerleading uniform. I will love you if I never see you again, and I will love you if I see you every Tuesday. I will love you if you cut your hair and I will love you if you cut the hair of others. I will love you if you abandon your baticeering, and I will love you if you retire from the theater to take up some other, less dangerous occupation. I will love you if you drop your raincoat on the floor instead of hanging it up and I will love you if you betray your father. I will love you even if you announce that the poetry of Edgar Guest is the best in the world and even if you announce that the work of Zilpha Keatley Snyder is unbearably tedious. I will love you if you abandon the theremin and take up the harmonica and I will love you if you donate your marmosets to the zoo and your tree frogs to M. I will love you as the starfish loves a coral reef and as kudzu loves trees, even if the oceans turn to sawdust and the trees fall in the forest without anyone around to hear them. I will love you as the pesto loves the fetuccini and as the horseradish loves the miyagi, as the tempura loves the ikura and the pepperoni loves the pizza. I will love you as the manatee loves the head of lettuce and as the dark spot loves the leopard, as the leech loves the ankle of a wader and as a corpse loves the beak of the vulture. I will love you as the doctor loves his sickest patient and a lake loves its thirstiest swimmer. I will love you as the beard loves the chin, and the crumbs love the beard, and the damp napkin loves the crumbs, and the precious document loves the dampness in the napkin, and the squinting eye of the reader loves the smudged print of the document, and the tears of sadness love the squinting eye as it misreads what is written. I will love you as the iceberg loves the ship, and the passengers love the lifeboat, and the lifeboat loves the teeth of the sperm whale, and the sperm whale loves the flavor of naval uniforms. I will love you as a child loves to overhear the conversations of its parents, and the parents love the sound of their own arguing voices, and as the pen loves to write down the words these voices utter in a notebook for safekeeping. I will love you as a shingle loves falling off a house on a windy day and striking a grumpy person across the chin, and as an oven loves malfunctioning in the middle of roasting a turkey. I will love you as an airplane loves to fall from a clear blue sky and as an escalator loves to entangle expensive scarves in its mechanisms. I will love you as a wet paper towel loves to be crumpled into a ball and thrown at a bathroom ceiling and an eraser loves to leave dust in the hairdos of the people who talk too much. I will love you as a taxi loves the muddy splash of a puddle and as a library loves the patient tick of a clock. I will love you as a thief loves a gallery and as a crow loves a murder, as a cloud loves bats and as a range loves braes. I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong.

It may be the first day of your life, the prime of youth or several decades in, when Medicine Woman calls you. Your name on her list. Her new initiate. She crept in whilst you were sleeping, when you over-exerted, when you kissed him, or ate that, or lived there or pushed too hard just one time too many. She crept in and curled up in your cells, your heart, waiting to meet you. Longing to know you. Longing for you to know her, at last. And what feels like the end is in fact a beginning, of a new road, an unknown path of pain and healing. She will show you how to slow down, she will run her fingers roughly through your life and help you sort the busyness from what matters, she will show you how to find support… and who you really are, beyond your roles and expectations… and even more beyond the System the world has forced you into. She transports you into the timelessness of big pains and tiny joys. Initiates you into your strength. Into your love. Into your courage. Into a world beyond your control. She has sent me an invitation. I see yours too, tucked in your bag, amongst all the receipts and bills, the pens and detritus of life. Take it out. It is time.

The power of literature, I've always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is. As such, I've never bought into the idea that the writer requires any special ritual in order to write. If need be, I could write almost anywhere, as easily in an ashram as in a crowded cafe, or so I've always insisted when asked whether I write with a pen or a computer, at morning or night, alone or surrounded, in a saddle like Goethe, standing like Hemingway, lying down like Twain, and so on, as if there were a secret to it all that might spring the lock of the safe housing the novel, fully formed and ready for publication, apparently suspended in each of us.

This farmer has a rooster that is growing old, and the farmer decides it’s time to get a new rooster. So he goes down the road to his neighbor Gilroy, and he buys a young rooster. When he gets home,” Skippy was already laughing at his own joke, “he puts the young rooster in the pen. The young rooster struts up to the old rooster and says ‘Hey old-timer, you need to hit the road. This is my place now’. The old rooster says ‘You’re right, it is my time, but I’ll tell you what. Someday you’ll be old, and a young rooster will come along to kick you out. I don’t want the ladies to see me just walk away. Could you chase me around some, we’ll fight for a minute for me to keep my dignity, and then I’ll leave?’ And the young rooster feels sorry for the old one, and says ‘Sure, old-timer, let’s go.’ So the young rooster chases the old rooster around the henhouse, and the farmer comes out to see what the commotion is. He says ‘What the hell?’ He grabs his shotgun and blows the young rooster away. As the old rooster is chuckling, the farmer says ‘Damn Gilroy done sold me a gay rooster’!

Sir Bird preens next to me, tucking feathers into place with a low noise in his throat almost like he’s talking to himself. A slow smile spreads across Finn’s face as he rubs his knuckles—black and blue with several bruises from Sir Bird’s beak. “Let’s see,” he says, flipping through his father’s book. “Here! I’ll need some water in a shallow bowl . . . ink . . . yes, I think this is everything.” He gathers the items, then reads over the entry several times, eyebrows knit in concentration. Dipping his pen in the ink, he whispers strange words while writing on the surface of the water. The ink drips down, elongating the form of the symbols that still hover where he wrote them. I recognize one—change. But the rest I haven’t learned yet. Then, without warning, he lifts up the bowl and dumps the whole thing onto Sir Bird. Only instead of getting wet, as the water washes over his body, Sir Bird’s feathers turn . . . blue. Bright, brilliant, shimmering blue. Squawking in outrage, Sir Bird hops and flies around the room, frantically shaking his feathers. He lands on the desk with a scrabble of clawed feet, then begins trying to bite off the color. “Ha!” Finn says, pointing at his knuckles. “Now you’re black and blue, too!” I can’t help but laugh at my poor, panicking bird. Not to mention the ridiculous pettiness of Finn’s magic show. Picking up Sir Bird, I stroke his feathers and speak softly to him. “Hush now. I’ll make him fix you. You’re still very handsome, but blue isn’t your color, is it?” He caws mournfully, still pulling at his own feathers. “Finn.” He puts his hands behind his back, trying to look innocent. “What? He deserved it.” “He’s a bird. You can’t really find this much satisfaction in revenge against a bird, can you?” His voice comes out just a tad petulant. “He started it.

When my son David was a high school senior in 2003, his graduating class went on a camping trip in the desert. A creative writing educator visited the camp and led the group through an exercise designed to develop their sensitivity and imaginations. Each student was given a pen, a notebook, a candle, and matches. They were told to walk a short distance into the desert, sit down alone, and “discover themselves.” The girls followed instructions. The boys, baffled by the assignment, gathered together, threw the notebooks into a pile, lit them with the matches, and made a little bonfire.

Since you haven’t got a name,” he said. “I guess you can pick one for yourself. Would you like to pick one for me to write down?” She stopped rocking and looked at him. “I can do that? It’s legal and everything?” He smiled. “It’s a free country again,” he said. “At least in theory.” She nodded. “And when I pick a name it can be any name I want?” He nodded. “What’s your name?” “Victor,” he said. “Vic, for short.” “Okay,” she said, leaning forward and taking the pad from under his large thing hands. “How do you spell that?” He spelled it and she wrote it down. Her handwriting was perfectly small and legible. “Can I be Victor, too?” she said, looking up from the pad. He smirked. “It’s a boy’s name,” he said. “You’re a girl. You have to add an i and an a to the end if you want to make it a girl’s name.” She looked down at the name she had written and added the letters i and a to the end. “Victoria,” she said, passing the notepad back to the cop. “Hello, Victoria,” he said, smiling, taking the pad and pen back and presenting his hand for a shake. “It’s nice to meet you, officially.

I met Jose Angelico the way I meet many of my customers. I have a workshop on the cemetery road, just past the coffin makers. I specialize in the small, simple stone. I am very aware that my clients have next to nothing, and renting the grave has often taken most of their money. So I modify and modify and get down to the very lowest cost. The dead, however, must have that stone: the reminder, the eternal reminder, that this man, this woman, this child---existed. On some of the graves the name is marked in paint, or even pen, and everyone knows how sad that is. Make something out of stone, I say, and noone touches the grave.The poor are not buried, you see. There is not enough ground here any more, so in the Naravo they build upwards. The graves of the poor are concrete boxes, each just big enough for the coffin. They go up and up---in some parts twenty boxes high. A funeral here is to slide the coffin in and watch the sealing of the compartment. Part of my service is that I cement the stone that I've made into place, and thus seal the chamber.

I haven’t got a clue what this lot’s supposed to mean,” he said, staring down at a long list of calculations. “You know,” said Ron, whose hair was on end because of all the times he had run his fingers through it in frustration, “I think it’s back to the old Divination standby.” “What — make it up?” “Yeah,” said Ron, sweeping the jumble of scrawled notes off the table, dipping his pen into some ink, and starting to write. “Next Monday,” he said as he scribbled, “I am likely to develop a cough, owing to the unlucky conjunction of Mars and Jupiter.” He looked up at Harry. “You know her — just put in loads of misery, she’ll lap it up.” “Right,” said Harry, crumpling up his first attempt and lobbing it over the heads of a group of chattering first years into the fire. “Okay … on Monday, I will be in danger of — er — burns.” “Yeah, you will be,” said Ron darkly, “we’re seeing the skrewts again on Monday. Okay, Tuesday, I’ll … erm …” “Lose a treasured possession,” said Harry, who was flicking through Unfogging the Future for ideas. “Good one,” said Ron, copying it down. “Because of … erm … Mercury. Why don’t you get stabbed in the back by someone you thought was a friend?” “Yeah … cool …” said Harry, scribbling it down, “because … Venus is in the twelfth house.” “And on Wednesday, I think I’ll come off worst in a fight.” “Aaah, I was going to have a fight. Okay, I’ll lose a bet.” “Yeah, you’ll be betting I’ll win my fight.

/A weekend toward the end of September, the bell above the door rang and there he was in the shop. Same old feeling in my guts. I’ll go if you want me to, he said. I smiled, I was so fucking happy to see him. You’ve only just got here, you twat, I said. Now give us a hand with this, and he took the other end of the trestle table and moved it over to the wall. Pub? I said. He grinned. And before I could say anything else he put his arms around me. And everything he couldn’t say in our room in France was said in that moment. I know, I said. I know. I’d already accepted I wasn’t the key to unlock him. She’d come later. It took a while to acknowledge the repercussions of that time. How the numbness in my fingertips traveled to my heart and I never even knew it. I had crushes, I had lovers, I had orgasms. My trilogy of desire, I liked to call it, but I’d no great love after him, not really. Love and sex became separated by a wide river and one the ferryman refused to cross. The psychiatrist liked that analogy. I watched him write it down. Chuckle, chuckle, his pen across the page.

Dear Pen Pal, I know it’s been a few years since I last wrote you. I hope you’re still there. I’m not sure you ever were. I never got any letters back from you when I was a kid. But in a way it was always therapeutic. Everyone else judges everything I say. And here you are: some anonymous person who never says “boo.” Maybe you just read my letters and laughed or maybe you didn’t read my letters or maybe you don’t even exist. It was pretty frustrating when I was young, but now I’m glad that you won’t respond. Just listen. That’s what I want. My dog died. I don’t know if you remember, but I had a beagle. He was a good dog. My best friend. I’d had him as far back as I could remember, but one day last month he didn’t come bounding out of his red doghouse like usual. I called his name. But no response. I knelt down and called out his name. Still nothing. I looked in his doghouse. There was blood everywhere. Cowering in the corner was my dog. His eyes were wild and there was an excessive amount of saliva coming out of his mouth. He was unrecognizable. Both frightened and frightening at the same time. The blood belonged to a little yellow bird that had always been around. My dog and the bird used to play together. In a strange way, it was almost like they were best friends. I know that sounds stupid, but… Anyway, the bird had been mangled. Ripped apart. By my dog. When he saw that I could see what he’d done, his face changed to sadness and he let out a sound that felt like the word ‘help.’ I reached my hand into his doghouse. I know it was a dumb thing to do, but he looked like he needed me. His jaws snapped. I jerked my hand away before he could bite me. My parents called a center and they came and took him away. Later that day, they put him to sleep. They gave me his corpse in a cardboard box. When my dog died, that was when the rain cloud came back and everything went to hell…

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man – or this woman – may use a typewriter, profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I have done for 30 years. As he writes, he can drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time he may rise from his table to look out through the window at the children playing in the street, and, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or he can gaze out at a black wall. He can write poems, plays, or novels, as I do. All these differences come after the crucial task of sitting down at the table and patiently turning inwards. To write is to turn this inward gaze into words, to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy. As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding new words to the empty page, I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.

I fixed her a drink, then lowered myself on the spider's silk of my attention back into One Hundred Years of Solitude and the adventures of the Buendia family. The scene where the prodigal Jose Arcadio hoisted his adopted sister by her waist into his hammock and, in my translation, 'quartered her like a little bird' made my face hot. I bent down the page, whose small triangle marks the instant. Touching that triangle of yellowed paper today is like sliding my hand into the glove of my seventeen-year-old hand. Through magic, there are the Iowa fields slipping by... And there is my mother, not yet born into the ziplock baggie of ash my sister sent me years ago with the frank message 'Mom 1/2', written in laundry pen, since no-one in our family ever stood on ceremony.

There was a time when wen we did not form all our words as we do now, in writing on a page. There was a time when the word "&" was written with several distinct & separate letters. It seems madness now. But there it is, & there is nothing we can do about it. Humanity learned to ride the rails, & that motion made us what we are, a ferromaritime people. The lines of the railsea go everywhere but from one place straight to another. It is always switchback, junction, coils around & over our own train-trails. What word better could there be to symbolize the railsea that connects & separates all lands, than “&” itself? Where else does the railsea take us, but to one place & that one & that one & that one, & so on? & what better embodies, in the sweep of the pen, the recurved motion of trains, than “&”? An efficient route from where we start to where we end would make the word the tiniest line. But it takes a veering route, up & backwards, overshooting & correcting, back down again south & west, crossing its own earlier path, changing direction, another overlap, to stop, finally, a few hairs’ width from where we began. & tacks & yaws, switches on its way to where it’s going, as we all must do.

you are an exit wound the extra shot of tequila the tangled knot of hair that has to be cut out you are the cell phone ringing in a hushed theatre pebble wedged in the sole of a boot the bloody hangnail you are, just this once you are flip flops in a thunderstorm the boy’s lost erection a pen gone dry you are my father’s nightmare my mother’s mirage you are a manic high which is to say: you are a bad idea you are herpes despite the condom you are, I know better you are pieces of cork floating in the wine glass you are the morning after whose name I can’t remember still in my bed the hole in my rain boots vibrator with no batteries you are, shut up and kiss me you are naked wearing socks mascara bleeding down laughing cheeks you are the wrong guy buying me a drink you are the typo in an otherwise brilliant novel sweetalk into unprotected sex the married coworker my stubbed toe you are not new or uncommon not brilliant or beautiful you are a bad idea rock star in the back seat of a taxi burned popcorn top shelf, at half price you are everything I want you are a poem I cannot write a word I cannot translate you are an exit wound a name I cannot bring myself to say aloud

Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What in inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curse; for every author degenerates as soon as he begins to put a pen to paper in any way for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for nothing or for very little. And here, too, that Spanish proverb holds good, which declares that honour and money are not to be found in the same purse--honra y provecho no caben en un saco. The reason why Literature is in such a bad plight nowadays is simply and solely that people write books to make money. A man who is in want sits down and writes a book, and the public is stupid enough to buy it. The secondary effect of this is the ruin of language.

It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own light. But no doubt the first man that ever murdered an ox was regarded as murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would have been; and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and featest on their bloated livers in they pate-de-fois-gras. But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is adding insult to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, there, my civilized and enlightened gourmand dining off that roast beef, what is that handle made of?—what but the bones of the brother of the very ox you are eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring that fat goose? With a feather of the same fowl. And with what quill did the Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders formerly indite his circulars? It is only within the last month or two that that society passed a resolution to patronize nothing but steel pens.

And you, too, youthful reader, will realize the Vision (not the idle wish) of your heart, be it base or beautiful, or a mixture of both, for you will always gravitate toward that which you, secretly, most love. Into your hands will be placed the exact results of your own thoughts; you will receive that which you earn; no more, no less. Whatever your present environment may be, you will fall, remain, or rise with your thoughts, your Vision, your Ideal. You will become as small as your controlling desire; as great as your dominant aspiration: in the beautiful words of Stanton Kirkham Davis, "You may be keeping accounts, and presently you shall walk out of the door that for so long has seemed to you the barrier of your ideals, and shall find yourself before an audience—the pen still behind your ear, the ink stains on your fingers and then and there shall pour out the torrent of your inspiration. You may be driving sheep, and you shall wander to the city-bucolic and open-mouthed; shall wander under the intrepid guidance of the spirit into the studio of the master, and after a time he shall say, 'I have nothing more to teach you.' And now you have become the master, who did so recently dream of great things while driving sheep. You shall lay down the saw and the plane to take upon yourself the regeneration of the world.

Nice to have you back, girl,” he said softly. Then he turned to Alyss. “Ready to go?” She held up a hand. “One thing I have to take care of,” she said. She looked around the camp and spotted Petulengo, lurking guiltily by the goat pen. “Petulengo!” she called. Her voice was high and penetrating and he started, realizing he had been spotted. He looked around, seeking an escape route. But as he did so, Will unslung the massive longbow from his shoulder and casually plucked an arrow from his quiver. Suddenly, escaping didn’t seem like such a good idea. Then Alyss favored Petulengo with her most winning smile. “Don’t be frightened, dear,” she said soothingly. “I just want to say good-bye.” She beckoned to him, smiling encouragingly, and he stepped forward, gradually gaining in confidence as he realized that, somehow, he had won the favor of this young woman. Some of his old swagger returned as he approached and stood before her, urged a little closer by that smile. Underneath the ash and the dirt, he thought, she was definitely a looker. He gave her a smile in return. Petulengo, it has to be said, fancied himself with the ladies. Treat ’em rough and they’ll eat out of your hand, he thought. Then the smile disappeared like a candle being blown out. He felt a sudden jolt of agony in his right foot. Alyss’s heavy boot, part of Hilde’s wardrobe, had stamped down on his instep, just below the ankle. He doubled over instinctively, gasping with pain. Then Alyss pivoted and drove the heel of her open left hand hard into his nose, snapping his head back and sending him reeling. His arms windmilled and he crashed over onto the hard-packed dirt of the compound. He lay groggily, propped up on his elbows, coughing as blood coursed down the back of his throat. “Next time you throw firewood at an old lady,” Alyss told him, all traces of the winning smile gone, “make sure she can’t do that.” She turned to Will and dusted her hands together in a satisfied gesture. “Now I’m ready to go,” she said.

It is a curious thing that at my age — fifty-five last birthday — I should find myself taking up a pen to try to write a history. I wonder what sort of a history it will be when I have finished it, if ever I come to the end of the trip! I have done a good many things in my life, which seems a long one to me, owing to my having begun work so young, perhaps. At an age when other boys are at school I was earning my living as a trader in the old Colony. I have been trading, hunting, fighting, or mining ever since. And yet it is only eight months ago that I made my pile. It is a big pile now that I have got it — I don't yet know how big — but I do not think I would go through the last fifteen or sixteen months again for it; no, not if I knew that I should come out safe at the end, pile and all. But then I am a timid man, and dislike violence; moreover, I am almost sick of adventure. I wonder why I am going to write this book: it is not in my line. I am not a literary man, though very devoted to the Old Testament and also to the "Ingoldsby Legends." Let me try to set down my reasons, just to see if I have any.

I have rules,” she said to him. He stilled his pen, raised expressionless eyes to her face, and waited. “When you bring me an old servant who’s come willingly where the king’s men have bidden him, a man who’s never been convicted, or even accused, of a crime,” Fire said, “I will not take his mind. I’ll sit before him and ask questions, and if my presence makes him more talkative, very well. But I will not compel him to say things he would otherwise not have said. Nor,” she added, voice rising, “will I take the mind of a person who’s been fed too little, or denied medicines, or beaten in your jails. I won’t manipulate a prisoner you’ve mistreated.” Garan sat back and crossed his arms. “That’s rich, isn’t it? Your own manipulation is mistreatment; you’ve said it yourself.” “Yes, but mine is meant to be for good reason. Yours is not.” “It’s not my mistreatment. I don’t give the orders down there, I’ve no idea what goes on.” “If you want me to question them, you’d best find out.” To Garan’s credit, the treatment of Dellian prisoners did change after that. One particularly laconic man, after a session in which Fire learned positively nothing, thanked her for it specifically. “Best dungeons I ever been in,” he said, chewing on a toothpick. “Wonderful,” Garan grumbled when he’d gone. “We’ll grow a reputation for our kindness to lawbreakers.

To write, to be able to write, what does it mean? It means spending long hours dreaming before a white page, scribbling unconsciously, letting your pen play round a blot of ink and nibble at a half-formed word, scratching it, making it bristle with darts and adorning it with antennae and paws until it loses all resemblance to a legible word and turns into a fantastic insect or a fluttering creature half butterfly, half fairy. To write is to sit and stare, hypnotized, at the reflection of the window in the silver ink-stand, to feel the divine fever mounting to one's cheeks and forehead while the hand that writes grows blissfully numb upon the paper. It also means idle hours curled up in the hollow of the divan, and then the orgy of inspiration from which one emerges stupefied and aching all over, but already recompensed and ladened with treasures that one unloads slowly on to the virgin page in the little round pool of light under the lamp. To write is to pour one's innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper, at such frantic speed that sometimes one's hand struggles and rebels, overdriven by the impatient god who guides it — and to find, next day, in place of the golden bough that bloomed miraculously in that dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower. To write is the joy and torment of the idle. Oh to write! From time to time I feel a need, sharp as thirst in summer, to note and to describe. And then I take up my pen again and attempt the perilous and elusive task of seizing and pinning down, under its flexible double-pointed jib, the many-hued, fugitive, thrilling adjective.… The attack does not last long; it is but the itching of an old scar.

I know what she smells like. This little freckle on her neck when she pulls up her hair. Her upper lip is a little plumper than the lower. The curve of her wrist, when she holds a pen. It’s wrong, really wrong, but I know the shape of her. I go to sleep thinking about it, and then I wake up, go to work, and she is there, and it’s impossible. I tell her stuff I know she’ll agree to, just to hear her hum back at me. It’s like hot water down my fucking spine. She’s married. She’s brilliant. She trusts me, and all I think about is taking her to my office, stripping her, doing unspeakable things to her. And I want to tell her. I want to tell her that she’s luminous, she’s so bright in my mind, sometimes I can’t focus. Sometimes I forget why I came into the room. I’m distracted. I want to push her against a wall, and I want her to push back. I want to go back in time and punch her stupid husband on the day I met him and then travel back to the future and punch him again. I want to buy her flowers, food, books. I want to hold her hand, and I want to lock her in my bedroom. She’s everything I ever wanted and I want to inject her into my veins and also to never see her again. There’s nothing like her and these feelings, they are fucking intolerable. They were half-asleep while she was gone, but now she’s here and my body thinks it’s a fucking teenager and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. There is nothing I can do, so I’ll just . . . not.

By the way, what’s a Butterwald Duck?” I ask. “I saw supplies and a sign mentioning it in one of the other rooms at the library.” “Oh, those are for next month.” She takes off her glasses and sets them on the bedside table. “For the protest we’re holding to allow the ducks penned in at Butterwald Park free rein.” “Protest?” I ask. She nods. “The Austenites are very active in the community.” I set my guitar down, leaning it against the wall. “You’re terrorists?” Sarah rolls her pretty eyes. “Don’t be silly. We’re . . . an organization committed to bringing awareness to social issues, through what may be seen as semi-controversial methods at times.” “Exactly.” I nod. “Terrorists.” Sarah pinches my arm. “Ow . . . violent terrorists,” I tease.

The best description of this book is found within the title. The full title of this book is: "This is the story my great-grandfather told my father, who then told my grandfather, who then told me about how The Mythical Mr. Boo, Charles Manseur Fizzlebush Grissham III, better known as Mr. Fizzlebush, and Orafoura are all in fact me and Dora J. Arod, who sometimes shares my pen, paper, thoughts, mind, body, and soul, because Dora J. Arod is my pseudonym, as he/it incorporates both my first and middle name, and is also a palindrome that can be read forwards or backwards no matter if you are an upright man in the eyes of God or you are upside down in a tank of water wearing purple goggles and grape jelly discussing how best to spread your time between your work, your wife, and the toasted bread being eaten by the man you are talking to who goes by the name of Dendrite McDowell, who is only wearing a towel on his head and has an hourglass obscuring his “time machine”--or the thing that he says can keep him young forever by producing young versions of himself the way I avert disaster in that I ramble and bumble like a bee until I pollinate my way through flowery situations that might otherwise have ended up being more than less than, but not equal to two short parallel lines stacked on top of each other that mathematicians use to balance equations like a tightrope walker running on a wire stretched between two white stretched limos parked on a long cloud that looks like Salt Lake City minus the sodium and Mormons, but with a dash of pepper and Protestants, who may or may not be spiritual descendents of Mr. Maynot, who didn’t come over to America in the Mayflower, but only because he was “Too lazy to get off the sofa,” and therefore impacted this continent centuries before the first television was ever thrown out of a speeding vehicle at a man who looked exactly like my great-grandfather, who happens to look exactly like the clone science has yet to allow me to create

Digging Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look down Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds Bends low, comes up twenty years away Stooping in rhythm through potato drills Where he was digging. The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft Against the inside knee was levered firmly. He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep To scatter new potatoes that we picked, Loving their cool hardness in our hands. By God, the old man could handle a spade. Just like his old man. My grandfather cut more turf in a day Than any other man on Toner’s bog. Once I carried him milk in a bottle Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up To drink it, then fell to right away Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods Over his shoulder, going down and down For the good turf. Digging. The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Through living roots awaken in my head. But I’ve no spade to follow men like them. Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it.

For you, I would bring down the stars, wreath their fire around your neck like diamonds, and watch them pulse to the beat of your heart For you, I would capture the candlelight in the palm of my hand Give my breath to give it life A whisper, 'My love' So that it may grow Bright and hot And burn me For you, I would drink the salted oceans Until their depths Were swallowed into the depth of me How deep it is, this life This love, for you I cannot touch bottom I never will For you, I would mine the stony earth Until it relinquished The secrets of time Cracks in the stone wrinkles of the Earth As she turns her face to another new day And so I wish to live Every one of mine With you For you, I would be myself At long last I would live in my skin And breathe my words in my own voice Tinged with the accent Of a child calling to a car that will never stop And in the fading echo Nothing remains but the truth of me that is the love of you I have loved you with both Hands tied behind my back Bound with pen and ink Paper and words Sealed with someone else's name until this moment in which I am nothing but a man who loves a woman. There is nothing left to say Except to give all of my heart For you

We cannot feel badly for those who intentionally harm us. If we do, we will not be free from their heavy chains. Pity gives way to excuses and excuses will soften the heart of anyone. It’s a part of the human condition. It is the double-edged sword of compassion. Those who have been targeted are often very empathetic people. They may identify with being sensitive spirited. In the recovery community, it is called being an Empath. The dance between an empath and an abuser is one of control, mind games, and mockery. This is why education is such a critical step in the healing process. Tenderness from empaths will be used against them time and time again by psychological abusers. In Healing from Hidden Abuse, we have a lot of material to cover. My desire is that you will not feel rushed to quickly get through it from cover to cover. I enjoy reading books slowly, and reflecting on the words I have read. I will often sit down with a pen in hand and underline key phrases or sentences that jump out at me. That way, I can later go back and quickly remind myself of the nuggets that originally were meaningful. I would encourage you to do the same here. If you do push through this material, maybe consider coming back around for a second read and taking time to reflect a little

For there comes a time in the day’s occupations when old Money Writer falls so in love with an idea that he begins to gallop, steam, pant, rave, and write from the heart, in spite of himself. So, too, the man with the quill pen is suddenly taken with fevers, gives up purple ink for pure hot perspiration. Then he tatters quills by the dozen and, hours later, emerges ruinous from the bed of creation looking as if he had channeled an avalanche through his house. Now, you ask, what transpired? What caused these two almost compulsive liars to start telling the truth? Let me haul out my signs again. WORK It’s quite obvious that both men were working. And work itself, after a while, takes on a rhythm. The mechanical begins to fall away. The body begins to take over. The guard goes down. What happens then? RELAXATION And then the men are happily following my last advice: DON’T THINK Which results in more relaxation and more unthinkingness and greater creativity. Now

What passed in the mind of this man at the supreme moment of his agony cannot be told in words. He was still comparatively young, he was surrounded by the loving care of a devoted family, but he had convinced himself by a course of reasoning, illogical perhaps, yet certainly plausible, that he must separate himself from all he held dear in the world, even life itself. To form the slightest idea of his feelings, one must have seen his face with its expression of enforced resignation and its tear-moistened eyes raised to heaven. The minute hand moved on. The pistols were loaded; he stretched forth his hand, took one up, and murmured his daughter's name. Then he laid it down seized his pen, and wrote a few words. It seemed to him as if he had not taken a sufficient farewell of his beloved daughter. Then he turned again to the clock, counting time now not by minutes, but by seconds. He took up the deadly weapon again, his lips parted and his eyes fixed on the clock, and then shuddered at the click of the trigger as he cocked the pistol. At this moment of mortal anguish the cold sweat came forth upon his brow, a pang stronger than death clutched at his heart-strings. He heard the door of the staircase creak on its hinges—the clock gave its warning to strike eleven—the door of his study opened; Morrel did not turn round—he expected these words of Cocles, "The agent of Thomson & French." He placed the muzzle of the pistol between his teeth. Suddenly he heard a cry—it was his daughter's voice. He turned and saw Julie. The pistol fell from his hands. "My father!" cried the young girl, out of breath, and half dead with joy—"saved, you are saved!" And she threw herself into his arms, holding in her extended hand a red, netted silk purse.

XII. If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk Above its mates, the head was chopped, the bents Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk All hope of greenness? Tis a brute must walk Pashing their life out, with a brute's intents. XIII. As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair In leprosy; thin dry blades pricked the mud Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood. One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare, Stood stupified, however he came there: Thrust out past service from the devil's stud! XIV. Alive? he might be dead for aught I knew, With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain. And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane; Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked to deserve such pain. XV. I shut my eyes and turned them on my heart, As a man calls for wine before he fights, I asked one draught of earlier, happier sights, Ere fitly I could hope to play my part. Think first, fight afterwards, the soldier's art: One taste of the old time sets all to rights. XVI. Not it! I fancied Cuthbert's reddening face Beneath its garniture of curly gold, Dear fellow, till I almost felt him fold An arm to mine to fix me to the place, The way he used. Alas, one night's disgrace! Out went my heart's new fire and left it cold. XVII. Giles then, the soul of honour - there he stands Frank as ten years ago when knighted first, What honest man should dare (he said) he durst. Good - but the scene shifts - faugh! what hangman hands Pin to his breast a parchment? His own bands Read it. Poor traitor, spit upon and curst! XVIII. Better this present than a past like that: Back therefore to my darkening path again! No sound, no sight as far as eye could strain. Will the night send a howlet or a bat? I asked: when something on the dismal flat Came to arrest my thoughts and change their train. XIX. A sudden little river crossed my path As unexpected as a serpent comes. No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms; This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath For the fiend's glowing hoof - to see the wrath Of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes. XX. So petty yet so spiteful! All along, Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it; Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit Of mute despair, a suicidal throng: The river which had done them all the wrong, Whate'er that was, rolled by, deterred no whit. XXI. Which, while I forded - good saints, how I feared To set my foot upon a dead man's cheek, Each step, of feel the spear I thrust to seek For hollows, tangled in his hair or beard! - It may have been a water-rat I speared, But, ugh! it sounded like a baby's shriek. XXII. Glad was I when I reached the other bank. Now for a better country. Vain presage! Who were the strugglers, what war did they wage, Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank soil to a plash? Toads in a poisoned tank Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage - XXIII. The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque, What penned them there, with all the plain to choose? No footprint leading to that horrid mews, None out of it. Mad brewage set to work Their brains, no doubt, like galley-slaves the Turk Pits for his pastime, Christians against Jews.

I believe that I have not been fair to you and that, as a result, I must have led you around in circles and hurt you deeply. In doing so, however, I have led myself around in circles and hurt myself just as deeply. I say this not as an excuse or a means of self-justification but because it is true. If I have left a wound inside you, it is not just your wound but mine as well. So please try not to hate me. I am a flawed human being - a far more flawed being than you realize. Which is precisely why I do not want you to hate me. Because if you were to do that, I would really go to pieces. I can't do what you can do: I can't slip inside my shell and wait for things to pass. I don't know for a fact that you are really like that, but sometimes you give me that impression. I often envy that in you, which may be why I led you around in circles so much. This may be an over-analytical way of looking at things. Don't you agree? The therapy they perform here is certainly not over-analytical, but when you are under treatment for several months the way I am here, like it or not, you become more or less analytical. "This was caused by that, and that means this, because of which such-and-such." Like that. I can't tell whether this kind of analysis is trying to simplify the world or complicate it. In any case, I myself feel that I am far closer to recovery than I once was, and people here tell me this is true. This is the first time in a long while I have been able to sit down and calmly write a letter. The one I wrote you in July was something I had to squeeze out of me (though, to tell the truth, I don't remember what I wrote - was it terrible?), but this time I am very calm. How wonderful it is to be able to write someone a letter! To feel like conveying your thoughts to a person, to sit at your desk and pick up a pen, to put your thoughts into words like this is truly marvellous. Of course, once I do put them to words, I find I can only express a fraction of what I want to say, but that's all right. I'm happy just to be able to feel I want to write to someone. And so I am writing to you.

I might be a shameless flirt, but at least I don't have a horrible temper. You should come tend to my wounds from our squabble in the snow. I'm bruised all over thanks to you. Something clicked against the nightstand, and a pen rolled across the polished mahogany. Hissing, I snatched it up and scribbed: Go lick your wounds and leave me be. The paper vanished. It was gone for a while- far longer than it should have taken to write the few words that appeared on the paper when it returned. I'd much rather you licked my wounds for me. My heart pounded, faster and faster, and a strange sort of rush went through my veins as I read the sentence again and again. A challenge. I clamped my lips shut to keep from smiling as I wrote, Lick you where exactly? The paper vanished before I'd even completed the final mark. His reply was a long time coming. Then, Wherever you want to lick me, Feyre. I'd like to start with "Everywhere," but I can choose, if necessary. I wrote back, Let's hope my licking is better than yours. I remember how horrible you were at it Under the Mountain. Lie. He'd licked away my tears when I'd been a moment away from shattering. He'd done it to keep me distracted- keep me angry. Because anger was better than feeling nothing; because anger and hatred were the long-lasting fuel in the endless dark of my despair. The same way that music had kept me from breaking. Lucien had come to patch me up a few times, but no one risked quite so much in keeping me not only alive, but as mentally intact as I could be considering the circumstances. Just as he'd been doing these past few weeks- taunting and teasing me to keep the hollowness at bay. Just as he was doing now. I was under duress, his next note read. If you want, I'd be more than happy to prove you wrong. I've been told I'm very, very good at licking. I clenched my knees together and wrote back, Good night. A heartbeat later, his note said, Try not to moan too loudly when you dream about me. I need my beauty rest. I got up, chucked the letter in the burbling fire, and gave it a vulgar gesture. I could have sworn laughter rumbled down the hall.

THE MEETING" "Scant rain had fallen and the summer sun Had scorched with waves of heat the ripening corn, That August nightfall, as I crossed the down Work-weary, half in dream. Beside a fence Skirting a penning’s edge, an old man waited Motionless in the mist, with downcast head And clothing weather-worn. I asked his name And why he lingered at so lonely a place. “I was a shepherd here. Two hundred seasons I roamed these windswept downlands with my flock. No fences barred our progress and we’d travel Wherever the bite grew deep. In summer drought I’d climb from flower-banked combe to barrow’d hill-top To find a missing straggler or set snares By wood or turmon-patch. In gales of March I’d crouch nightlong tending my suckling lambs. “I was a ploughman, too. Year upon year I trudged half-doubled, hands clenched to my shafts, Guiding my turning furrow. Overhead, Cloud-patterns built and faded, many a song Of lark and pewit melodied my toil. I durst not pause to heed them, rising at dawn To groom and dress my team: by daylight’s end My boots hung heavy, clodded with chalk and flint. “And then I was a carter. With my skill I built the reeded dew-pond, sliced out hay From the dense-matted rick. At harvest time, My wain piled high with sheaves, I urged the horses Back to the master’s barn with shouts and curses Before the scurrying storm. Through sunlit days On this same slope where you now stand, my friend, I stood till dusk scything the poppied fields. “My cob-built home has crumbled. Hereabouts Few folk remember me: and though you stare Till time’s conclusion you’ll not glimpse me striding The broad, bare down with flock or toiling team. Yet in this landscape still my spirit lingers: Down the long bottom where the tractors rumble, On the steep hanging where wild grasses murmur, In the sparse covert where the dog-fox patters.” My comrade turned aside. From the damp sward Drifted a scent of melilot and thyme; From far across the down a barn owl shouted, Circling the silence of that summer evening: But in an instant, as I stepped towards him Striving to view his face, his contour altered. Before me, in the vaporous gloaming, stood Nothing of flesh, only a post of wood.

It all suddenly made me nervous, and a little, tiny, baby bit worried. Pulling one of the stools at the island back, I plopped into it and simply stared at that discolored, harsh face in unease. “I just want to know whether I need to steal a bat or make a phone call.” His mouth had been open and poised to argue with me… until he heard the last thing I said. “What?” “I need to know—” “What do you need to steal a bat for?” “Well, no one I know owns one, and I can’t go buy one at the store and have it caught on videotape.” “Videotape?” Did he know nothing? “Aiden, come on, if you beat the shit out of someone with a bat, they’re going to look for suspects. Once they have suspects, they’ll look through their things or their purchases. They’ll see I bought one recently and know it was premeditated. Why are you looking at me like that?” His mauve-colored eyelids went heavy over the bright whites of his eyes, and the expression on his face was filled such a vast range of emotions, one after another after another, that I wasn’t sure which one I was supposed to hold on to. He switched the icepack to the other side of his bruised jaw and shook his head. “The amount you know about committing crimes is terrifying, Van.” His mouth twitched under the rainbow of whatever he was thinking. “It scares the hell out of me, and I don’t get scared easily.” I snorted, pretty pleased with myself. “Calm down. I went through this phase when I was into watching a lot of crime TV shows. I’ve never even stolen a pen in my life.” Aiden’s careful expression didn’t go anywhere. “I’m not trying to kill anyone… unless we had to,” I joked weakly. His nostrils flared so slightly I almost missed it. But what I didn’t miss was the way the corners of his mouth tipped up into a tiny smile. I smiled at him as innocently as possible. “So do you want to tell me who’s going to get the fists of fury?” I hoped I sounded as harmless as I intended, even though I felt the exact opposite as every second passed. “Fists of fury?” “Yep.” I held up my hands just a little so he could see them. He had no idea the number of fights I’d gotten into with my sisters over the years. I didn’t always win—I rarely won if I was going to be honest—but I never gave up. The sigh that came out of him was so long and drawn out, I kind of prepped myself for the half-assed answer that was going to come out of his mouth. “It’s nothing.” There it was

And, even now, as he paced the streets, and listlessly looked round on the gradually increasing bustle and preparation for the day, everything appeared to yield him some new occasion for despondency. Last night, the sacrifice of a young, affectionate, and beautiful creature, to such a wretch, and in such a cause, had seemed a thing too monstrous to succeed; and the warmer he grew, the more confident he felt that some interposition must save her from his clutches. But now, when he thought how regularly things went on, from day to day, in the same unvarying round; how youth and beauty died, and ugly griping age lived tottering on; how crafty avarice grew rich, and manly honest hearts were poor and sad; how few they were who tenanted the stately houses, and how many of those who lay in noisome pens, or rose each day and laid them down each night, and lived and died, father and son, mother and child, race upon race, and generation upon generation, without a home to shelter them or the energies of one single man directed to their aid; how, in seeking, not a luxurious and splendid life, but the bare means of a most wretched and inadequate subsistence, there were women and children in that one town, divided into classes, numbered and estimated as regularly as the noble families and folks of great degree, and reared from infancy to drive most criminal and dreadful trades; how ignorance was punished and never taught; how jail-doors gaped, and gallows loomed, for thousands urged towards them by circumstances darkly curtaining their very cradles' heads, and but for which they might have earned their honest bread and lived in peace; how many died in soul, and had no chance of life; how many who could scarcely go astray, be they vicious as they would, turned haughtily from the crushed and stricken wretch who could scarce do otherwise, and who would have been a greater wonder had he or she done well, than even they had they done ill; how much injustice, misery, and wrong, there was, and yet how the world rolled on, from year to year, alike careless and indifferent, and no man seeking to remedy or redress it; when he thought of all this, and selected from the mass the one slight case on which his thoughts were bent, he felt, indeed, that there was little ground for hope, and little reason why it should not form an atom in the huge aggregate of distress and sorrow, and add one small and unimportant unit to swell the great amount.

On reflection, looking at shows like this and considering my own experiences, what fascinated me was that we have so many stories like this that help us empathize with monstrous men. “Yes, these men are flawed, but they are not as evil as this man.” Even more chilling, they tend to be stories that paint women as roadblocks, aggressors, antagonists, complications—but only in the context of them being a bitch, a whore, a Madonna. The women are never people. Stories about monstrous men are not meant to teach us how to empathize with the women and children murdered, but with the men fighting over their bodies. As a woman menaced by monsters, I find this particularly interesting, this erasure of me from a narrative meant to, if not justify, then explain the brokenness of men. There are shows much better at this, of course, which don’t paint women out of the story—Mad Men is the first to come to mind, and Game of Thrones—but True Detective doubled down. The women terrorized by monsters in real life are active agents. They are monster-slayers, monster-pacifiers, monster-nurturers, monster-wranglers—and some of them are monsters, too. In truth, if we are telling a tale of those who fight monsters, it fascinates me that we are not telling more women’s stories, as we’ve spun so many narratives like True Detective that so blatantly illustrate the sexist masculinity trap that turns so many human men into the very things they despise. Where are the women who fight them? Who partner with them? Who overcome them? Who battle their own monsters to fight greater ones? Because I have and continue to be one of those women, navigating a horror show world of monsters and madmen. We are women who write books and win awards and fight battles and carve out extraordinary lives from ruin and ash. We are not background scenery, our voices silenced, our motives and methods constrained to sex. I cannot fault the show’s men for forgetting that; they’ve created the world as they see it. But I can prod the show’s exceptional writers, because in erasing the narrative of those whose very existence is constantly threatened by these monsters, including trusted monsters whose natures vacillate wildly, they sided with the monsters. I’m not a bit player in a monster’s story. But with narratives like this perpetuated across our media, it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s how my obituary read: a catalogue of the men who sired me, and fucked me, and courted me. Stories that are not my own. Funny, isn’t it? The power of story. It’s why I picked up a pen. I slay monsters, too.

Because now mental health disorders have gone “mainstream”. And for all the good it’s brought people like me who have been given therapy and stuff, there’s a lot of bad it’s brought too. Because now people use the phrase OCD to describe minor personality quirks. “Oooh, I like my pens in a line, I’m so OCD.” NO YOU’RE FUCKING NOT. “Oh my God, I was so nervous about that presentation, I literally had a panic attack.” NO YOU FUCKING DIDN’T. “I’m so hormonal today. I just feel totally bipolar.” SHUT UP, YOU IGNORANT BUMFACE. Told you I got angry. These words – words like OCD and bipolar – are not words to use lightly. And yet now they’re everywhere. There are TV programmes that actually pun on them. People smile and use them, proud of themselves for learning them, like they should get a sticker or something. Not realizing that if those words are said to you by a medical health professional, as a diagnosis of something you’ll probably have for ever, they’re words you don’t appreciate being misused every single day by someone who likes to keep their house quite clean. People actually die of bipolar, you know? They jump in front of trains and tip down bottles of paracetamol and leave letters behind to their devastated families because their bullying brains just won’t let them be for five minutes and they can’t bear to live with that any more. People also die of cancer. You don’t hear people going around saying: “Oh my God, my headache is so, like, tumoury today.” Yet it’s apparently okay to make light of the language of people’s internal hell

FURIOUS FAVOR I wonder if David would be allowed in our churches today. In most cases, when a church member has an affair, he is shunned at best or mistreated at worst—even if he repents. But David doesn’t just have an affair. He lusts, covets, fornicates, lies, and gets another man hammered. Then he tries to keep his dirty little secrets by murdering the husband of the woman he “loves.” I doubt I’ve met anyone as sinful as David. Have you? He breaks half of the Ten Commandments in a single episode. And he doesn’t repent until he’s caught. But when Nathan shoves his prophetic finger into David’s chest and rebukes him, David falls to his knees and admits his guilt. And right then, at that moment, God rips open the heavens to reach down and touch David’s soul with stubborn delight. God eagerly forgives David for his sin, and all of it is buried at the bottom of the sea, never to be remembered again. There is no hiccup in God’s furious favor toward David. So why do repentant sinners still bear the stigma of “adulterer,” “divorced,” or “addict” in our churches today? It’s one thing if they don’t repent. But quite often we shun repentant sinners, like Jeffrey Dahmer, whose crimes we just can’t forget. “He’s the former addict.” “That’s the divorced mom.” “Here comes the guy who slept with the church secretary.” For some reason we love to define people by the sin in their lives—even past sin in their lives—rather than by the grace that forgave it. It’s no wonder that David pens the last sentence in Psalm 23: “Surely goodness and mercy shall [hunt me down] all the days of my life” (Ps. 23:6).

Imagine you live on a planet where the dominant species is far more intellectually sophisticated than human beings but often keeps humans as companion animals. They are called the Gorns. They communicate with each other via a complex combination of telepathy, eye movements & high-pitched squeaks, all completely unintelligible & unlearnable by humans, whose brains are prepared for verbal language acquisition only. Humans sometimes learn the meaning of individual sounds by repeated association with things of relevance to them. The Gorns & humans bond strongly but there are many Gorn rules that humans must try to assimilate with limited information & usually high stakes. You are one of the lucky humans who lives with the Gorns in their dwelling. Many other humans are chained to small cabanas in the yard or kept in outdoor pens of varying size. They are so socially starved they cannot control their emotions when a Gorn goes near them. The Gorns agree that they could never be House-Humans. The dwelling you share with your Gorn family is filled with water-filled porcelain bowls.Every time you try to urinate in one,nearby Gorn attack you. You learn to only use the toilet when there are no Gorns present. Sometimes they come home & stuff your head down the toilet for no apparent reason. You hate this & start sucking up to the Gorns when they come home to try & stave this off but they view this as evidence of your guilt. You are also punished for watching videos, reading books, talking to other human beings, eating pizza or cheesecake, & writing letters. These are all considered behavior problems by the Gorns. To avoid going crazy, once again you wait until they are not around to try doing anything you wish to do. While they are around, you sit quietly, staring straight ahead. Because they witness this good behavior you are so obviously capable of, they attribute to “spite” the video watching & other transgressions that occur when you are alone. Obviously you resent being left alone, they figure. You are walked several times a day and left crossword puzzle books to do. You have never used them because you hate crosswords; the Gorns think you’re ignoring them out of revenge. Worst of all, you like them. They are, after all, often nice to you. But when you smile at them, they punish you, likewise for shaking hands. If you apologize they punish you again. You have not seen another human since you were a small child. When you see one you are curious, excited & afraid. You really don’t know how to act. So, the Gorn you live with keeps you away from other humans. Your social skills never develop. Finally, you are brought to “training” school. A large part of the training consists of having your air briefly cut off by a metal chain around your neck. They are sure you understand every squeak & telepathic communication they make because sometimes you get it right. You are guessing & hate the training. You feel pretty stressed out a lot of the time. One day, you see a Gorn approaching with the training collar in hand. You have PMS, a sore neck & you just don’t feel up to the baffling coercion about to ensue. You tell them in your sternest voice to please leave you alone & go away. The Gorns are shocked by this unprovoked aggressive behavior. They thought you had a good temperament. They put you in one of their vehicles & take you for a drive. You watch the attractive planetary landscape going by & wonder where you are going. You are led into a building filled with the smell of human sweat & excrement. Humans are everywhere in small cages. Some are nervous, some depressed, most watch the goings on on from their prisons. Your Gorns, with whom you have lived your entire life, hand you over to strangers who drag you to a small room. You are terrified & yell for your Gorn family to help you. They turn & walk away.You are held down & given a lethal injection. It is, after all, the humane way to do it.

I will not mention the name (and what bits of it I happen to give here appear in decorous disguise) of that man, that Franco-Hungarian writer... I would rather not dwell upon him at all, but I cannot help it— he is surging up from under my pen. Today one does not hear much about him; and this is good, for it proves that I was right in resisting his evil spell, right in experiencing a creepy chill down my spine whenever this or that new book of his touched my hand. The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale; and as for history it will limit his life story to the dash between two dates. Lean and arrogant, with some poisonous pun ever ready to fork out and quiver at you, and with a strange look of expectancy in his dull brown veiled eyes, this false wag had, I daresay, an irresistible effect on small rodents. Having mastered the art of verbal invention to perfection, he particularly prided himself on being a weaver of words, a title he valued higher than that of a writer; personally, I never could understand what was the good of thinking up books, of penning things that had not really happened in some way or other; and I remember once saying to him as I braved the mockery of his encouraging nods that, were I a writer, I should allow only my heart to have imagination, and for the rest rely upon memory, that long-drawn sunset shadow of one’s personal truth. I had known his books before I knew him; a faint disgust was already replacing the aesthetic pleasure which I had suffered his first novel to give me. At the beginning of his career, it had been possible perhaps to distinguish some human landscape, some old garden, some dream- familiar disposition of trees through the stained glass of his prodigious prose... but with every new book the tints grew still more dense, the gules and purpure still more ominous; and today one can no longer see anything at all through that blazoned, ghastly rich glass, and it seems that were one to break it, nothing but a perfectly black void would face one’s shivering soul. But how dangerous he was in his prime, what venom he squirted, with what whips he lashed when provoked! The tornado of his passing satire left a barren waste where felled oaks lay in a row, and the dust still twisted, and the unfortunate author of some adverse review, howling with pain, spun like a top in the dust.

A lot of her songs were to do with Blake, which did not escape Mark’s attention. She told Mark that writing songs about him was cathartic and that ‘Back to Black’ summed up what had happened when their relationship had ended: Blake had gone back to his ex and Amy to black, or drinking and hard times. It was some of her most inspired writing because, for better or worse, she’d lived it. Mark and Amy inspired each other musically, each bringing out fresh ideas in the other. One day they decided to take a quick stroll around the neighbourhood because Amy wanted to buy Alex Clare a present. On the way back Amy began telling Mark about being with Blake, then not being with Blake and being with Alex instead. She told him about the time at my house after she’d been in hospital when everyone had been going on at her about her drinking. ‘You know they tried to make me go to rehab, and I told them, no, no, no.’ ‘That’s quite gimmicky,’ Mark replied. ‘It sounds hooky. You should go back to the studio and we should turn that into a song.’ Of course, Amy had written that line in one of her books ages ago. She’d told me before she was planning to write a song about what had happened that day, but that was the moment ‘Rehab’ came to life. Amy had also been working on a tune for the ‘hook’, but when she played it to Mark later that day it started out as a slow blues shuffle – it was like a twelve-bar blues progression. Mark suggested that she should think about doing a sixties girl-group sound, as she liked them so much. He also thought it would be fun to put in the Beatles-style E minor and A minor chords, which would give it a jangly feel. Amy was unaccustomed to this style – most of the songs she was writing were based around jazz chords – but it worked and that day she wrote ‘Rehab’ in just three hours. If you had sat Amy down with a pen and paper every day, she wouldn’t have written a song. But every now and then, something or someone turned the light on in her head and she wrote something brilliant. During that time it happened over and over again. The sessions in the studio became very intense and tiring, especially for Mark, who would sometimes work a double shift and then fall asleep. He would wake up with his head in Amy’s lap and she would be stroking his hair, as if he was a four-year-old. Mark was a few years older than Amy, but he told me he found her very motherly and kind.

I trudge toward the porch, entertaining the idea of running the other way. But technically, I shouldn't be in any trouble. It wasn't my car. I'm not the one who got a ticket. Samantha Forza did. And the picture on Samantha Forza's driver's license looks a lot like Rayna. She told Officer Downing that she swerved to keep from hitting a camel, which Officer Downing graciously interpreted as a deer after she described it as "a hairy animal with four legs and a horn." Since no one formed a search party to look for either a camel or a unicorn, I figured we were in the clear. But from Mom's expression, I'm miles from clear. "Hi," I say as I reach the steps. "We'll see about that," she says, grabbing my face and shining a pen light in my eyes. I slap it away. "Really? You're checking my pupils? Really?" "Hal said you looked hazy," she says, clipping the pen back on the neckline of her scrubs. "Hal? Who's Hal?" "Hal is the paramedic who took your signature when you declined medical treatment. He radioed in to the hospital after he left you." "Oh. Well, then Hal would have noticed I was just in an accident, so I might have been a little out of it. Doesn't mean I was high." So it wasn't small-town gossip, it was small-county gossip. Good ole Hal's probably transported hundreds of patients to my mom in the ER two towns over. She scowls. "Why didn't you call me? Who is Samantha?" I sigh and push past her. There's no reason to have this conversation on the porch. She follows me into the house. "She's Galen's sister. I didn't call because I didn't have a signal on my cell. We were on a dead road." "Where was Galen? Why were you driving his car?" "He was home. We were just taking it for a drive. He didn't want to come." Technically, all these statements are true, so they sound believable when I say them. Mom snorts and secures the dead bolt on the front door. "Probably because he knows his sister is life threatening behind the wheel." "Probably.

Pay attention to everything the dying person says. You might want to keep pens and a spiral notebook beside the bed so that anyone can jot down notes about gestures, conversations, or anything out of the ordinary said by the dying person. Talk with one another about these comments and gestures. • Remember that there may be important messages in any communication, however vague or garbled. Not every statement made by a dying person has significance, but heed them all so as not to miss the ones that do. • Watch for key signs: a glassy-eyed look; the appearance of staring through you; distractedness or secretiveness; seemingly inappropriate smiles or gestures, such as pointing, reaching toward someone or something unseen, or waving when no one is there; efforts to pick at the covers or get out of bed for no apparent reason; agitation or distress at your inability to comprehend something the dying person has tried to say. • Respond to anything you don’t understand with gentle inquiries. “Can you tell me what’s happening?” is sometimes a helpful way to initiate this kind of conversation. You might also try saying, “You seem different today. Can you tell me why?” • Pose questions in open-ended, encouraging terms. For example, if a dying person whose mother is long dead says, “My mother’s waiting for me,” turn that comment into a question: “Mother’s waiting for you?” or “I’m so glad she’s close to you. Can you tell me about it?” • Accept and validate what the dying person tells you. If he says, “I see a beautiful place!” say, “That’s wonderful! Can you tell me more about it?” or “I’m so pleased. I can see that it makes you happy,” or “I’m so glad you’re telling me this. I really want to understand what’s happening to you. Can you tell me more?” • Don’t argue or challenge. By saying something like “You couldn’t possibly have seen Mother, she’s been dead for ten years,” you could increase the dying person’s frustration and isolation, and run the risk of putting an end to further attempts at communicating. • Remember that a dying person may employ images from life experiences like work or hobbies. A pilot may talk about getting ready to go for a flight; carry the metaphor forward: “Do you know when it leaves?” or “Is there anyone on the plane you know?” or “Is there anything I can do to help you get ready for takeoff?” • Be honest about having trouble understanding. One way is to say, “I think you’re trying to tell me something important and I’m trying very hard, but I’m just not getting it. I’ll keep on trying. Please don’t give up on me.” • Don’t push. Let the dying control the breadth and depth of the conversation—they may not be able to put their experiences into words; insisting on more talk may frustrate or overwhelm them. • Avoid instilling a sense of failure in the dying person. If the information is garbled or the delivery impossibly vague, show that you appreciate the effort by saying, “I can see that this is hard for you; I appreciate your trying to share it with me,” or “I can see you’re getting tired/angry/frustrated. Would it be easier if we talked about this later?” or “Don’t worry. We’ll keep trying and maybe it will come.” • If you don’t know what to say, don’t say anything. Sometimes the best response is simply to touch the dying person’s hand, or smile and stroke his or her forehead. Touching gives the very important message “I’m with you.” Or you could say, “That’s interesting, let me think about it.” • Remember that sometimes the one dying picks an unlikely confidant. Dying people often try to communicate important information to someone who makes them feel safe—who won’t get upset or be taken aback by such confidences. If you’re an outsider chosen for this role, share the information as gently and completely as possible with the appropriate family members or friends. They may be more familiar with innuendos in a message because they know the person well.

We're in her bedroom,and she's helping me write an essay about my guniea pig for French class. She's wearing soccer shorts with a cashmere sweater, and even though it's silly-looking, it's endearingly Meredith-appropriate. She's also doing crunches. For fun. "Good,but that's present tense," she says. "You aren't feeding Captain Jack carrot sticks right now." "Oh. Right." I jot something down, but I'm not thinking about verbs. I'm trying to figure out how to casually bring up Etienne. "Read it to me again. Ooo,and do your funny voice! That faux-French one your ordered cafe creme in the other day, at that new place with St. Clair." My bad French accent wasn't on purpose, but I jump on the opening. "You know, there's something,um,I've been wondering." I'm conscious of the illuminated sign above my head, flashing the obvious-I! LOVE! ETIENNE!-but push ahead anyway. "Why are he and Ellie still together? I mean they hardly see each other anymore. Right?" Mer pauses, mid-crunch,and...I'm caught. She knows I'm in love with him, too. But then I see her struggling to reply, and I realize she's as trapped in the drama as I am. She didn't even notice my odd tone of voice. "Yeah." She lowers herself slwoly back to the floor. "But it's not that simple. They've been together forever. They're practically an old married couple. And besides,they're both really...cautious." "Cautious?" "Yeah.You know.St. Clair doesn't rock the boat. And Ellie's the same way. It took her ages to choose a university, and then she still picked one that's only a few neighborhoods away. I mean, Parsons is a prestigious school and everything,but she chose it because it was familiar.And now with St. Clair's mom,I think he's afraid to lose anyone else.Meanwhile,she's not gonna break up with him,not while his mom has cancer. Even if it isn't a healthy relationship anymore." I click the clicky-button on top of my pen. Clickclickclickclick. "So you think they're unhappy?" She sighs. "Not unhappy,but...not happy either. Happy enough,I guess. Does that make sense?" And it does.Which I hate. Clickclickclickclick. It means I can't say anything to him, because I'd be risking our friendship. I have to keep acting like nothing has changed,that I don't feel anything ore for him than I feel for Josh.