Sand Castles Quotes

I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that's where they begin. Their great skills is their capacity to escalate.

Writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.

You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won't really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we'll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.

I'm just saying it's not all sand castles and ninjas.

I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.

And so castles made of sand slips into the sea, eventually.

We are like children building a sand castle. We embellish it with beautiful shells, bits of driftwood, and pieces of colored glass. The castle is ours, off limits to others. We’re willing to attack if others threaten to hurt it. Yet despite all our attachment, we know that the tide will inevitably come in and sweep the sand castle away. The trick is to enjoy it fully but without clinging, and when the time comes, let it dissolve back into the sea.

Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you -- beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

You had every right to be. He raised his eyes to look at her and she was suddenly and strangely reminded of being four years old at the beach, crying when the wind came up and blew away the castle she had made. Her mother had told her she could make another one if she liked, but it hadn't stopped her crying because what she had thought was permanent was not permanent after all, but only made out of sand that vanished at the touch of wind and water.

And you're too nice," he added, above the lap-lap of the water and the patter of sand on the water-lily leaves. "I was relying on you being too jealous to let that demon near the place.

But I don't think building sand castles in the air is such a terrible thing to do, as long as you don't take it too seriously.

The castle of Cair Paravel on its little hill towered up above them; before them were the sands, with rocks and little pools of salt water, and seaweed, and the smell of the sea and long miles of bluish-green waves breaking for ever and ever on the beach. And oh, the cry of the seagulls! Have you ever heard it? Can you remember?

It isn’t a perfect place. There are no perfect places. But nobody cares about perfection when there are sand castles to build and kites to chase, children that are being born, old hearts that are giving in.

Children make prayers so thoughtlessly, building them up like sand castles—and they are always surprised when suddenly the castle becomes real, and the iron gate grinds shut.

I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that's where they begin. Their great skills is their capacity to escalate.

The Seventh Sense" Women who build nations learn to love men who build nations learn to love children building sand castles by the rising sea

Life is the bad with all the good. The deadly sharks with the beautiful sea stars. The gigantic waves with the sand castles. The licorice with the lemon and lime. The loud lyrics with the rhythm of the music. The liver disease with the love of a father and son. It’s life. Sweet, beautiful, wind on your face, air in your lungs, kisses on your lips. life.

Even castles made of sand, fall into the sea, eventually.

Here's to real heroes, not the ones who carry us off into the sunset but the ones who help us choose our princes." - commentary on Castles on the Sand

Sand castles just aren't made to last.

The emotions attached to them were like sand castles in the tide, slowly washing out to sea.

then things got even stranger. Mr. Brunner, who'd been out in front of the museum a minute before, wheeled his chair into the doorway of the gallery, holding a pen in his hand. "What ho, Percy!" he shouted, and tossed the pen through the air. Mrs. Dodds lunged at me. With a yelp, I dodged and felt talons slash the air next to my ear. I snatched the ballpoint pen out of the air, but when it hit my hand, it wasn't a pen anymore. It was a sword-Mr. Brunner's bronze sword, which he always used on tourement day. Mrs. Dodds spun toward me with a murderous look in her eyes. My knees were jelly. My hands were shaking so bad I almost dropped the sword. She snarled, "Die, honey!" And she flew straight at me. Absolute terror ran through my body. I did the only thing that came naturally:I swung the sword. The metal blade hit her shoulder and passed through her body as if she were made made of water. Hisss! Mrs. Dodds was a sand castle in a power fan. She exploded into yellow powder, vaporized on the spot, leaving nothing but the smell of sulfur and a dying screech and a chill of evil in the air, as if those two glowing red eyes were still watching me.

And then I cried a flood of tears as if I really were a mermaid who had absorbed too much sea into herself. The tears spilled like a balm, like a potion, like a charm. In them swam a little girl whose father was dying without ever having seen her. In them swam a girl whose mother’s magic – the only thing the girl envied more than anything else in the world, the thing that had made her invisible, the most precious thing –might be dying too. In them swam a green-haired girl who had never been touched by the boy to whom she was so devoted that she would have lived with him forever in a shack by the sea or a ruined sand castle even if he never made love to her. My tears were for me, but they were also for him. They were to wash away the thing that had frightened him so much so long ago. The wound inside his thigh. My tears poured out of me and he drank them down his throat. He drank them in gulps deep into himself, swallowing sorrow. Someday,” he said, “when we are ready, I will give you back your tears.

Split the Castle open, find me, find you. We, two, felt sand, wind, air. One felt whip. Whipped, Once shipped. We, two, black. Me, you. One grew from cocoa's soil, birthed from nut, skin uncut, still bleeding. We two, wade. The waters seem different but are same. Our same. Sister skin. Who knew? Not me. Not you

Sometimes, Miki, you’ve got to stop building sand castles just to watch the ocean take them away,” Kane murmured against his cheek. “Sometimes, you just need to find someone to sit on the beach with you.

You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander.

Let the sandcastle collapse. In its place, I will build a fortress—one that the waves of nature and time could never destroy.

She was supposed to build sand castles on the beach and put her toes in the ocean,” Madame says.

I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that’s where they begin. Their great skill is their capacity to escalate.

Cruelty is seldom forgotten. You feel it as a child. Somebody takes away your toy or thoughtlessly kicks over your sand castle. A beautiful boy walks into your life, sees something he doesn’t like or doesn’t understand, and painstakingly endeavours to make you feel how much he hates you, to be constantly aware of the flaws that provoke that hatred. And then you grow older and wiser, but you don’t forget the cruelty. You can’t forget it, because there is nothing stronger, nothing more palpable in the human brain than the memory of mistreatment.

The big system can be pretty overwhelming. We know that we can’t beat them by competing with them. What we can do is build small systems where we live and work that serve our needs as we define us and not as they ‘re defined for us. The big boys in their shining armor are up there on castle walls hurling their thunderbolts. We’re the ants patiently carrying sand a grain at a time from under the castle wall. We work from the bottom up. The knights up there don’t see the ants and don’t know what we’re doing. They’ll figure it out only when the wall begins to fall. It takes time and quiet persistence. Always remember this: They fight with money and we resist with time, and they’re going to run out of money before we run out of time

We all behave like Maxwell’s demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecules at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as “superintelligent,” but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant. Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe.

I’m alive,” he groaned. “But I’m not doing a very good job of it.

even the Pyramids and other “great works” were as ephemeral as a castle of sand on the beach at Brighton.

That's the hell of sand castles. They are always doomed. That's part of their beauty — their impermanence.

The other one was filled with loud and obnoxious tourists. Always boasting on winning a sand castle competition and seeing who could get tanned first. What a whacky bunch of people.

Seeing the world with all the unspoiled simplicity of a young child, you are free from concepts of beauty and ugliness, good and evil, and no longer fall prey to conflicting tendencies driven by desire or repulsion. Why trouble yourself about all the ups and downs of daily life, like a child who delights in building a sand castle but cries when it collapses? To get what they want and be rid of what they dislike, look how people throw themselves into torments, like moths plunging into the flame of a lamp! Would it not be better to put down your heavy burden of dreamlike obsessions once and for all? 

We must be kind and forgive one another or we won't survive. But even among the most religious there seems to be a great blind spot covering the world, an inability to learn from past experience. Civilization is as precarious as a sand castle. All the care and effort it took to create it can be knocked down in a second by some bully or another. And the world is full of bullies.

I recall those beautiful summer mornings with my parents by the sandy beach of Belek. My father used to teach me how to ride waves. I remember him constantly emphasizing the fact that no wave, no matter how big it is should stir enough fear inside me to keep me glued to the shore. He used to repeat those words while glancing at my mother with a smile that could set the whole sea on fire. My mother, sitting on the beach, too afraid of the deep blue sea, contented herself with building sand castles, ones my father would step on trying to drag her hopelessly into water. Step on your sand castle and dive deep. Dive deep into the unknown. Life is damn too short for building sand castles.

That’s really all art is about, I think, and not just pictures—it’s the same with books and stories and sculpture and even castles in the sand. Some things call to us, that’s all. It’s as if the people who made them were speaking inside our heads.

The past is gone, Claire. It's like a sand castle washed away by the waves. We can remember what it looked like, but even if we build it again, it won't be the exactly the same.

Warm fog swirled in the canyon as we gradually descended. A hundred feet in front of us everything was lost in the fog and a hundred feet behind us everything was lost in the fog. We were walking in a capsule between amnesias.

Normally, her mind was like a busy beach - all day long she would run back and forth, leaving footprints, building small mounds and castles, writing out ideas and diagrams with her fingers in the sand, but when the night tide came in, she would close her eyes and allow each wave of rhythmic breath to wash in and out over her day's accumulation, and before long the beach would be clear and empty, and she would drift off to sleep.

As I lay there watching Robin sleep beside me, I realized that she was right all along. I didn’t need to live in a castle — a shack in the woods with her would do just fine. And for that matter, I didn’t need to be prince of the ocean either, because with her by my side… I was king of the pond.

She packed everything into the shopping bags with the urgent efficiency of someone building a sand castle at sundown, as the tide comes in. Like a dream you know will end. If I move fast enough, I won't wake the gods.

Yet despite all our attachment, we know that the tide will inevitably come in and sweep the sand castle away. The trick is to enjoy it fully but without clinging, and when the time comes, let it dissolve back into the sea.

We Built a Castle Near the Rocks, we built it out of sand. Our fortress was an ice-cream box with turret, tall and grand. Our men were twigs, our gun were straws from which we'd sipped at lunch. We had the best of wars... till someone's foot went CRUNCH! [Joan Walsh Anglund]

It all begins so hopefully, but these Worlds we build for ourselves are all just castles in the sand, waiting for the evening tide.

It's not worth it to build castles on the sand if they get destroyed by the waves of reality.

It’s okay to cry, sweetie. It only means you have a heart so full it doesn’t have room for tears.

I still am me I am the little girl I still have wet sand on my feet From the beach castles I built with my hands Nearby the sea Which then later Cold melted by the waves But not in my dreams In my dreams The castles Are now greater than Those in fairytales

She does this. Told me JP was cheating on me, trashed my Facebook page-' 'Why?' 'Because she's like that.' 'I thought you two were friends.' 'We are.' 'So how, exactly, do you define the term, "friend"?

Your personality of the mind is like a castle of sand around the sea. The time you begin to disassociate yourself with different experiences and impressions of both the external and internal world, you won’t find anything inside.

Although something inside told her that this was a crime—after all, her three books were the most precious items she owned—she was compelled to see the thing lit. She couldn't help it. I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that's where they begin. Their great skill is their capacity to escalate.

Anything not founded on truth will fall eventually; like a castle made of sand melts into the sea.

feels like a sandcastle; temporary and something that the waves of life and time will soon ruin…

I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that's where they begin. Their great skill is their capacity to escalate.

the stories were becoming just that: stories. The emotions attached to them were like sand castles in the tide, slowly washing out to sea.

I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that’s where they begin. Their great skill is their capacity to escalate

Boys loved to tear down the things they build up, whether a sand castle or a prince.

guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that’s where they begin. Their great skill is their capacity to escalate.

At that realization, I swore to myself that through it all, I would always be by his side. Let the sandcastle collapse. In its place, I will build a fortress—one that waves could never destroy.

If our faith rests on God’s veracity, it has an absolute and eternally unshakable foundation. If it rests on our own mind, it is as secure as sand. Does your faith look like a castle or a sand castle?

The softly flowing, white, and parched clouds passed by. I, colored gray, merely kept staring at them as they slowly vanished out of my sight. Onto the sand castle that I'm building from the stars I've been collecting, my faint prayer spills and drips down, as the ocean waves lying in waiting sweep and trip you up. a world of darkness. a world of silence. Although my disappearing prayer is being stirred up by the wind, I will not let that fire go out. No matter how many times I rebuild the sand castle with my frosting hands tangled up in busyness, the ocean waves lying in waiting just keep sweeping it away... ...towards you.

When I was a boy, playing at the beach, I remember a game I loved, which was an omen of my future life. I would dig a channel with high sides in the sand for the sea to fill. But when the water flooded the path I created for it with such violence that it destroyed everything in its way: my castles made of pebbles, my dikes of sand. It swept away everything, destroying it all, then disappeared, leaving me with a heavy heart, yet not daring to ask for pity, since the sea had only responded to my call. It's the same with love. You call out for it, you plan its course. The wave crashes into your heart, but it's so different from how you imagined it, so bitter and icy.

We spend our youth building sandcastles of ambition, then watch as life blows sands of doubt over our carefully crafted turrets of wishes and dreams, until we can no longer see them at all. We learn to settle instead for flattened lives, residing inside prisons of compromise. A little relieved that the windows of the world we settled for are too small to see out of, so we don’t have to stare at the castle-shaped fantasies of who we might have been.

They sent a knight to save you once And found you curled up with the dragon Crown askew, skirts singed They tried marrying you, Couldn’t hack it, went home, You liked the acoustics much better In empty castles. (the dragon was teaching you to roar.) Six wars they waged against you— Disgruntled princes with their Silent knights. Blood in the fields, in the water, In the snow, on their crowns, When you added them To your collections. Rarely smiled, laughed only with the dragon, Looked so often over your shoulder You almost forgot to watch ahead. Here’s the secret you took to your grave; You were holding whole kingdoms But your palms were made of sand. - Elisabeth Hewer, “Obituary for the princess who forgot to be a fairytale

My God!" Amaury glared resentfully at the armed men surrounding his own as Castle Eberhart came into view. "See you the gall of the woman?" Blake hid a smile an shrugged. "'Twould seem your bride would have you safely delivered." "Safely delivered?" Grimacing,he shook his head. "She sends her man out to fetch me as if I am a stray cow." "Surely she would not send so many for a cow?" Amaury glared at his laughing friend. Blake shrugged. "Well,I have said it afore and-" "If you say once more that I should refuse to marry her,I will strike you down right here." "You may try," Blake allowed with a small smile.

Without knowing it he drew a very pleasant picture of an affectionate, happy family who lived unpretentiously in circumstances of moderate affluence at peace with themselves and the world and undisturbed by any fear that anything might happen to affect their security. The life he described lacked neither grace nor dignity; it was healthy and normal, and through its intellectual interests not entirely material; the persons who led it were simple and honest, neither ambitious nor envious, prepared to do their duty by the state and by their neighbors according to their lights; and there was in them neither harm nor malice. If Lydia saw how much of their good nature, their kindliness, their unpleasing self-complacency depended on the long-established and well-ordered prosperity of the country that had given them birth; if she had an inkling that, like children building castles on the sea sand, they might at any moment be swept away by a tidal wave, she allowed no sign of it to appear on her face.

Filled with hope, Ico looked into Yorda's eyes. He felt like was looking into an hourglass, trying to pick through the grains of sand for some truth buried there long ago. He hadn't found anything yet, but the warmth of Yorda's hands in his told him that he was getting close.

My heart got drenched by tears, got overflow with it, The pain remained in heart as there was no one to embrace me, Now I have neither consciousness nor expectation. I gave my life to ocean as happiness and sadness became same for me, Let my heart be like waves looking for love, But all now I will keep wandering forever for love till the ends of time, Lifeless forever, Just as castle build of sands always gets washed off!

My destiny is to remind you to look up from the castles you're building in the sand long enough to notice the cathedrals that God's building all around you - without you, without your sweat, without your tears, without your consent. While you dream your dreams, he's busy building your destiny. And there is as much beauty in your destiny as there was in your dream. Let go and believe that whatever its is, it will be beautiful.

He told me things as they were, told me that I could rise up from my past and be better. The reason we could never be together was because I believed that I was irreparable and he didn’t share the same conviction. Being with him meant constantly disappointing him just by being who I was.

Although something inside told her that this was a crime — after all, her three books were the most precious items she owned — she was compelled to see the thing lit. She couldn’t help it. I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that’s where they begin. Their great skill is their capacity to destroy.

She lit up the darkness surrounding The Shade, and for a kingdom that had no mornings, only eternal night, her light was life.

When I'm writing a first draft I'm constantly reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.

And you’re too nice,” he added, above the lap-lap of the water and the patter of sand on the water-lily leaves. “I was relying on you being too jealous to let that demon near the place.

Fookin' Irish, they're a race of political masochists, they love their fookin' chiefs and princes an' a strong hand belting. It's like the man said in the play, Abair and focal republic i nGaoluinn?

Breathing Under Water,” a title taken from a telling poem by Carol Bieleck, r.s.c.j., which seemed to sum up so much of the common message. I quote it here in full:   “Breathing Under Water”   I built my house by the sea. Not on the sands, mind you; not on the shifting sand. And I built it of rock. A strong house by a strong sea. And we got well acquainted, the sea and I. Good neighbors. Not that we spoke much. We met in silences. Respectful, keeping our distance, but looking our thoughts across the fence of sand. Always, the fence of sand our barrier, always, the sand between.   And then one day, —and I still don’t know how it happened— the sea came. Without warning.   Without welcome, even Not sudden and swift, but a shifting across the sand like wine, less like the flow of water than the flow of blood. Slow, but coming. Slow, but flowing like an open wound. And I thought of flight and I thought of drowning and I thought of death. And while I thought the sea crept higher, till it reached my door. And I knew then, there was neither flight, nor death, nor drowning. That when the sea comes calling you stop being neighbors Well acquainted, friendly-at-a-distance, neighbors And you give your house for a coral castle, And you learn to breathe underwater.3

He raised his eyes to look at her and she was suddenly and strangely reminded of being four years old at the beach, crying when the wind came up and blew away the castle she had made. Her mother had told her she could make another one if she liked, but it hadn’t stopped her crying because what she had thought was permanent was not permanent after all, but only made out of sand that vanished at the touch of wind or water.

12. They had spent a lot of time on the beach, as did everyone for miles around when the sun decided to shine. Theirs was no ordinary beach; it was a gorgeous swathe of golden sand, framed by granite cliffs upon which stood the crumbling walls of an ancient castle. There were caves to explore too, hidden in the cliffs. Children and adults alike would venture deep into them, discovering a dark world that belonged predominantly to birds and sea creatures.

Athlen smelled of seaweed and salt and crisp ocean wind. The scent reminded Tal of the depths of the blue, the cool rush of water, and the beaches near the castle, smooth stones and swirling eddies, coarse sand on the soles of his bare feet.

When a fine old carpet is eaten by mice, the colors and patterns of what's left behind do not change,' wrote my neighbor and friend, the poet Jane Hirschfield, after she visited an old friend suffering from Alzheimer's disease in a nursing home. And so it was with my father. His mind did not melt evenly into undistinguishable lumps, like a dissolving sand castle. It was ravaged selectively, like Tintern Abbey, the Cistercian monastery in northern Wales suppressed in 1531 by King Henry VIII in his split with the Church of Rome. Tintern was turned over to a nobleman, its stained-glass windows smashed, its roof tiles taken up and relaid in village houses. Holy artifacts were sold to passing tourists. Religious statues turned up in nearby gardens. At least one interior wall was dismantled to build a pigsty. I've seen photographs of the remains that inspired Wordsworth: a Gothic skeleton, soaring and roofless, in a green hilly landscape. Grass grows in the transept. The vanished roof lets in light. The delicate stone tracery of its slim, arched quatrefoil windows opens onto green pastures where black-and-white cows graze. Its shape is beautiful, formal, and mysterious. After he developed dementia, my father was no longer useful to anybody. But in the shelter of his broken walls, my mother learned to balance her checkbook, and my heart melted and opened. Never would I wish upon my father the misery of his final years. But he was sacred in his ruin, and I took from it the shards that still sustain me.

There are only two lives we might live: our dream or our destiny. Sometimes they are one in the same, and sometimes they’re not. Often our dreams are just a path to our destinies. My dream was to be an adoptive mother, but my destiny is to mother my three children, to be a wife, sister, friend, and daughter, and to speak hope boldly to you. My destiny is to remind you to look up from the castles you’re building in the sand long enough to notice the cathedrals that God’s building all around you—without you, without your sweat, without your tears, without your consent. While you dream your dreams, he’s busy building your destiny. And there is as much beauty in your destiny as there was in your dream. Let go and believe that whatever it is, it will be beautiful.I

What builds up castles, tears down mountains, makes some blind, helps others to see? SAND. (Thankee-sai) What lives in winter, dies in summer, and grows with its roots upward? AN ICICLE. (Blaine, you say true) Man walks over, man walks under, in time of war he burns asunder? A BRIDGE. (Thankee-sai)

It follows that any perturbation of the system, whether it is a random jiggling of its parts or a whack from the outside, will, by the laws of probability, nudge the system toward disorder or uselessness—not because nature strives for disorder, but because there are so many more ways of being disorderly than of being orderly. If you walk away from a sandcastle, it won’t be there tomorrow, because as the wind, waves, seagulls, and small children push the grains of sand around, they’re more likely to arrange them into one of the vast number of configurations that don’t look like a castle than into the tiny few that do.

I’ve also come to believe in the complete and utter insignificance of the self, and I think that helps a lot. For example, if you thought you were the most important thing in the Universe, then you would have to bend the entire Universe to your will. If you’re the most important thing in the Universe, then how could it not conform to your desires. If it doesn’t conform to your desires, something is wrong. However, if you view yourself as a bacteria or an amoeba—or if you view all of your works as writing on water or building castles in the sand, then you have no expectation for how life should “actually” be. Life is just the way it is.

Oh, what the ocean did to a man. How unmatched it was. One could competitively build a giant castle made of sand or even hire architects to construct a true castle by the shore made of rocks and furnish its enormous insides with crystals. Yet plop him closer to the sea and within seconds, he will yield and feel as dumb as any other measly man lost at land.

buildings, or he helped them in wars, or in rounding up dangerous animals. In the calm adventures, he got new things to eat and people gave him toys. He lost most of the toys as he was scrambling back home over the rocks, but he did manage to bring back the shiny shell necklace the silly ladies gave him, because he could hang it around his neck. He went to the Anywhere with the silly ladies several times. It had blue sea and white sand, perfect for digging and building in. There were ordinary people in it, but Christopher only saw them in the distance. The silly ladies came and sat on rocks out of the sea and giggled at him while he made sand castles. “Oh clistoffer!” they would coo, in lisping voices. “Tell uth what make you a clistoffer.” And they would all burst into screams of high laughter. They were the only ladies he had seen without clothes on. Their skins were greenish and

After we’d first slept together, I’d never told anyone, but I’d struggled deep inside. As I’d sketched his image the morning after I lost my virginity to him, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of insecurity and fear. I had just given him all of me in the span of a night. He’d been my first kiss, my first love… my first everything. On the other hand, for him, I was only one among many women who had come before me. Doubts about him losing interest in me and me being unable to equal the more experienced women he’d been with had plagued me.

For the next hour, the subject of Pandora's board game business was discarded as the group worked on the sandcastle. They paused at intervals to drink thirstily from jugs of cold water and lemonade that had been sent down from the house. Pandora threw herself into the project with enthusiasm, consulting with Justin, who had decided the castle must have a moat, square corner towers, a front gatehouse with a drawbridge, and battlement walls from which the occupants could drop scalding water or molten tar onto the advancing enemy. Gabriel, who'd been instructed to dig the moat, stole frequent glances at Pandora, who had enough energy for ten people. Her face glowed beneath her battered straw hat, which she had managed to pry away from Ajax. She was sweaty and covered in sand, a few escaped locks of hair trailing over her neck and back. She played with the unselfconscious ease of a child, this woman of radical thoughts and ambitions. She was beautiful. Complex. Frustrating. He'd never met a woman who was so wholly and resolutely herself. What the devil was he going to do about her?

A falcon. I can see that. I thought you said nothing lived here?” Sand’s face went blank. “There was nothing alive, except for me, until Merlin. And then you.” Perrotte bit back her exasperation, and said simply, “Go on.” He twined his blunt-tipped fingers together, staring down at them. “I, erm. I found the falcon in the mews.” “So, it’s not true that there was nothing alive in the castle?” “The truth is . . . Well, the truth is the truth, and thus worth telling, but sometimes truths are so complicated that it’s exhausting to get them out in the right order.” He glanced up at her. That sounded like an evasion if ever she’d heard one. She raised an eyebrow. “The falcon was dead!” Sand blurted out. “Stuffed and mounted, and then also damaged in the sundering. I mended him, and put him on the mantel, so I’d have something to talk to. But a couple days before you—you came upstairs—” He gestured helplessly at the bird, who stopped stripping water from its feathers just long enough to glare at the humans. Perrotte stared. “The bird came to life,” she whispered. “After you put it to rights, this falcon came to life. Just like me.” “Well . . .

for Jared Lyman (March 28, 1975-February 3, 2012) A man who knew how to love people. For his son's twenty-fifth birthday (sixteen years from now) he wrote: No Unlesses I love you and I'm proud of you You might be watching this from prison If so - I love you and I'm proud of you If you're watching this from backstage at Carnegie Hall - I love you and I'm proud of you. It doesn't really matter where you are or what you're doing... I will always be proud of you and I will always love you. I think that's what I'd say. I almost said “Unless...” But I couldn't think of an “Unless” Nope No “unlesses

It was in the Cornish summer of his twelfth year that Peter began to notice just how different the worlds of children and grown-ups were. You could not exactly say that the parents never had fun. They went for swims - but never for longer than twenty minutes. They liked a game of volleyball, but only for half an hour or so. Occasionally they could be talked into hide-and-seek or lurky turkey or building a giant sand-castle, but those were special occasions. The fact was that all grown-ups, given half the chance, chose to sink into one of three activities on the beach: sitting around talking, reading newspapers and books, or snoozing. Their only exercise (if you could call it that) was long boring walks, and these were nothing more than excuses for more talking. On the beach, they often glanced at their watches and, long before anyone was hungry, began telling each other it was time to start thinking about lunch or supper. They invented errands for themselves - to the odd-job man who lived half a mile away, or to the garage in the village, or to the nearby town on shopping expeditions. They came back complaining about the holiday traffic, but of course they were the holiday traffic. These restless grown-ups made constant visits to the telephone box at the end of the lane to call their relatives, or their work, or their grown-up children. Peter noticed that most grown-ups could not begin their day happily until they had driven off to find a newspaper, the right newspaper. Others could not get through the day without cigarettes. Others had to have beer. Others could not get by without coffee. Some could not read a newspaper without smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee. Adults were always snapping their fingers and groaning because someone had returned from town and forgotten something; there was always one more thing needed, and promises were made to get it tomorrow - another folding chair, shampoo, garlic, sun-glasses, clothes pegs - as if the holiday could not be enjoyed, could not even begin, until all these useless items had been gathered up.

I have this theory, that this will be the only city that future archaeologists find, Las Vegas. The dry climate will preserve it all and teams of scientists in the year 5000 will carefully sweep and scrape away the sand to find pyramids and castles and replicas of the Eiffel Tower and the New York skyline and stripper poles and snapper cards and these future archaeologists will re-create our entire culture based solely on this one shallow and cynical little shithole. We can complain all we want that this city doesn’t represent us. We can say, Yes, but I hated Las Vegas. Or I only went there once. Well, I’m sure not all Romans reveled in the torture-fests at the Colosseum either, but there it is.

It was the Kojagar full moon, and I was slowly pacing the riverside conversing with myself. It could hardly be called a conversation, as I was doing all the talking and my imaginary companion all the listening. The poor fellow had no chance of speaking up for himself, for was not mine the power to compel him helplessly to answer like a fool? But what a night it was! How often have I tried to write of such, but never got it done! There was not a line of ripple on the river; and from away over there, where the farthest shore of the distant main stream is seen beyond the other edge of the midway belt of sand, right up to this shore, glimmers a broad band of moonlight. Not a human being, not a boat in sight; not a tree, nor blade of grass on the fresh-formed island sand-bank. It seemed as though a desolate moon was rising upon a devastated earth; a random river wandering through a lifeless solitude; a long-drawn fairy-tale coming to a close over a deserted world,—all the kings and the princesses, their ministers and friends and their golden castles vanished, leaving the Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers and the Unending Moor, over which the adventurous princes fared forth, wanly gleaming in the pale moonlight. I was pacing up and down like the last pulse-beats of this dying world. Every one else seemed to be on the opposite shore—the shore of life—where the British Government and the Nineteenth Century hold sway, and tea and cigarettes.

In his work Maladies and Remedies of the Life of the Flesh, published in Leiden under the pseudonym Christianus Democritus, he claimed to have discovered the Elixir of Life—a liquid counterpart to the Philosopher’s Stone—which would heal any ailment and grant eternal life to the person who drank it. He tried, but failed, to exchange the formula for the deed to Frankenstein Castle, and the only use he ever made of his potion—a mixture of decomposing blood, bones, antlers, horns and hooves—was as an insecticide, due to its incomparable stench. This same quality led the German troops to employ the tarry, viscous fluid as a non-lethal chemical weapon (therefore exempt from the Geneva Convention), pouring it into wells in North Africa to slow the advance of General Patton and his men, whose tanks pursued them across the desert sands. An ingredient in Dippel’s elixir would eventually produce the blue that shines not only in Van Gogh’s Starry Night and in the waters of Hokusai’s Great Wave, but also on the uniforms of the infantrymen of the Prussian army, as though something in the colour’s chemical structure invoked violence: a fault, a shadow, an existential stain passed down from those experiments in which the alchemist dismembered living animals to create it, assembling their broken bodies in dreadful chimeras he tried to reanimate with electrical charges, the very same monsters that inspired Mary Shelley to write her masterpiece, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, in whose pages she warned of the risk of the blind advancement of science, to her the most dangerous of all human arts.

It seems to me," he said, "that we as a society have come to overlook the second clause. We hear only 'Take what you want, says God'; nobody mentions a price, and when it comes time to settle the score, everyone's outraged. Take the national economic explosion, as the most obvious example: that's come at a price, and a very steep one, to my mind. We have sushi bars and SUVs, but people our age can't afford homes in the city where they grew up, so centuries-old communities are disintegrating like sand castles. People spend five or six hours a day in traffic; parents never see their children, because they both have to work overtime to make ends meet. We no longer have time for culture--theaters are closing, architecture is being wrecked to make way for office blocks. And so on and so forth." He didn't sound even mildly indignant, only absorbed. "I don't consider this anything to become incensed about," he said, reading my look. "In fact, it shouldn't be remotely surprising to anyone. We've taken what we wanted and we're paying for it, and no doubt many people feel that on balance the deal is a good one. What I do find surprising is the frantic silence that surrounds this price. The politicians tell us, constantly, that we live in Utopia. If anyone with any visibility ever suggests that this bliss may not come free, then that dreadful little man--what's his name? the prime minister--comes on the television, not to point out that this toll is the law of nature, but to deny furiously that it exists and to scold us like children for mentioning it. I finally had to get rid of the television," he added, a little peevishly. "We've become a nation of defaulters: we buy on credit, and when the bill comes in, we're so deeply outraged that we refuse even to look at it.

thought there might not be a sky: he had an idea that the formless rock went on and on in a great arch overhead—but when he thought about it, that did not seem possible. Christopher always knew in his dream that you could get to Almost Anywhere from The Place Between. He called it Almost Anywhere because there was one place that did not want you to go to it. It was quite near, but he always found himself avoiding it. He set off sliding, scrambling, edging across bulging wet rock, and climbing up or down, until he found another valley and another path. There were hundreds of them. He called them the Anywheres. The Anywheres were mostly quite different from London. They were hotter or colder, with strange trees and stranger houses. Sometimes the people in them looked ordinary, sometimes their skin was bluish or reddish and their eyes were peculiar, but they were always very kind to Christopher. He had a new adventure every time he went on a dream. In the active adventures people helped him escape through cellars of odd buildings, or he helped them in wars, or in rounding up dangerous animals. In the calm adventures, he got new things to eat and people gave him toys. He lost most of the toys as he was scrambling back home over the rocks, but he did manage to bring back the shiny shell necklace the silly ladies gave him, because he could hang it around his neck. He went to the Anywhere with the silly ladies several times. It had blue sea and white sand, perfect for digging and building in. There were ordinary people in it, but Christopher only saw them in the distance. The silly ladies came and sat on rocks out of the sea and giggled at him while he made sand castles. “Oh clistoffer!” they would coo, in lisping voices. “Tell uth what make you a clistoffer.” And they would all burst into screams of high laughter. They were the only ladies he had seen without clothes on. Their skins were greenish and so was their hair. He was fascinated by the way the ends of them were big silvery tails that could curl and flip

to look at Louisa, stroked her cheek, and was rewarded by a dazzling smile. She had been surprised by how light-skinned the child was. Her features were much more like Eva’s than Bill’s. A small turned-up nose, big hazel eyes, and long dark eyelashes. Her golden-brown hair protruded from under the deep peak of her bonnet in a cascade of ringlets. “Do you think she’d come to me?” Cathy asked. “You can try.” Eva handed her over. “She’s got so heavy, she’s making my arms ache!” She gave a nervous laugh as she took the parcel from Cathy and peered at the postmark. “What’s that, Mam?” David craned his neck and gave a short rasping cough. “Is it sweets?” “No, my love.” Eva and Cathy exchanged glances. “It’s just something Auntie Cathy’s brought from the old house. Are you going to show Mikey your flags?” The boy dug eagerly in his pocket, and before long he and Michael were walking ahead, deep in conversation about the paper flags Eva had bought for them to decorate sand castles. Louisa didn’t cry when Eva handed her over. She seemed fascinated by Cathy’s hair, and as they walked along, Cathy amused her by singing “Old MacDonald.” The beach was only a short walk from the station, and it wasn’t long before the boys were filling their buckets with sand. “I hardly dare open it,” Eva said, fingering the string on the parcel. “I know. I was desperate to open it myself.” Cathy looked at her. “I hope you haven’t built up your hopes, too much, Eva. I’m so worried it might be . . . you know.” Eva nodded quickly. “I thought of that too.” She untied the string, her fingers trembling. The paper fell away to reveal a box with the words “Benson’s Baby Wear” written across it in gold italic script. Eva lifted the lid. Inside was an exquisite pink lace dress with matching bootees and a hat. The label said, “Age 2–3 Years.” Beneath it was a handwritten note:   Dear Eva, This is a little something for our baby girl from her daddy. I don’t know the exact date of her birthday, but I wanted you to know that I haven’t forgotten. I hope things are going well for you and your husband. Please thank him from me for what he’s doing for our daughter: he’s a fine man and I don’t blame you for wanting to start over with him. I’m back in the army now, traveling around. I’m due to be posted overseas soon, but I don’t know where yet. I’ll write and let you know when I get my new address. It would be terrific if I could have a photograph of her in this little dress, if your husband doesn’t mind. Best wishes to you all, Bill   For several seconds they sat staring at the piece of paper. When Eva spoke, her voice was tight with emotion. “Cathy, he thinks I chose to stay with Eddie!” Cathy nodded, her mind reeling. “Eddie showed me the letter he sent. Bill wouldn’t have known you were in Wales, would he? He would have assumed you and Eddie had already been reunited—that he’d written with your consent on behalf of you both.” She was afraid to look at Eva. “What are you going to do?” Eva’s face had gone very pale. “I don’t know.” She glanced at David, who was jabbing a Welsh flag into a sand castle. “He said he was going to be posted overseas. Suppose they send him to Britain?” Cathy bit her lip. “It could be anywhere, couldn’t it? It could be the other side of the world.” She could see what was going through Eva’s mind. “You think if he came here, you and he could be together without . . .” Her eyes went to the boys. Eva gave a quick, almost imperceptible nod, as if she was afraid someone might see her. “What about Eddie?” “I don’t know!” The tone of her voice made David look up. She put on a smile, which disappeared the