There’s always one of those wild-eyed and squirrely folk bounding across the Mass. Ave. Bridge in a pair of tiny shorts and nothing else in the subzero meatlocker blast freezer chill of February in Boston. Crazed with endorphins, grimacing–or frozen–in a rictus of glee, he looks like some ancient saint caught in his moment of […]
It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he’s gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive — and he was, all the way to the end — we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. […]
She weren’t much kip at comforting, our mum: a lozenge on the tongue and a darkened room were all we expected in exchange for our illnesses. Outside, the occasional screech: “Turn that down, yer sister’s sick!” The council house would rattle whenever one of the neighbor boys in a desperate bid for freedom would ram […]
A chocolate you did not want to eat does not count as chocolate. This discovery is from the same branch of culinary physics that determined that food eaten while walking contains no calories. –Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
There is no dweller there who has not pictured themselves elsewhere: Broken away from the honeycomb of walls to wash over the sea’s surface in their square, fluorescent-lit tub. Lifted on an elephant’s back in a wobbling grey-paneled box Or lifted into the rainforest canopy a tiny treehouse with computer, mouse and ergonomic chair.
Great stories happen to those who can tell them. —Ira Glass
One ended up in a car dealership squinting out through a dry orange morning at an endless series of cold days. One left a dense trail of words behind her like pawprints through the forest to where none, eventually, could follow. One died young, in a fall from his dorm room window that was never […]
Situations arise because of the weather, and no kinds of love are better than others. –The Velvet Underground, “Some Kinda Love”
“You’ve got a time machine, I’ve got a gun. What the hell. Let’s kill Hitler.” –Doctor Who, Series 6, Episode 8 Like the fistful of atoms in their jacket of steel, the idea has a cradle. This is the house where the idea was born These, the fields that nurtured it, This, the sky under […]
Honey, it takes a lot of money to look this cheap. –Dolly Parton
janehalpern 