When Aziza first spotted Mariam in the morning, her eyes always sprang open, and she began mewling and squirming in her mother's grip. She thrust her arms toward Mariam, demanding to be held, her tiny hands opening and closing urgently, on her face a look of both adoration and quivering anxiety..."Why have you pinned your little heart to an old, ugly hag like me?" Mariam would murmur into Aziza's hair... "What have I got to give you?"But Aziza only muttered contentedly and dug her face in deeper. And when she did that, Mariam swooned. Her eyes watered. Her heart took flight. And she marveled at how, after all these years of rattling loose, she had found in this little creature the first true connection in her life of false, failed connections.

A breeze ruffled the neat hedges of Privet Drive, which lay silent and tidy under the inky sky, the very last place you would expect astonishing things to happen. Harry Potter rolled over inside his blankets without waking up. One small hand closed on the letter beside him and he slept on, not knowing he was special, not knowing he was famous, not knowing he would be woken in a few hours' time by Mrs. Dursley's scream as she opened the front door to put out the milk bottles, nor that he would spend the next few weeks being prodded and pinched by his cousin Dudley...He couldn't know that at this very moment, people meeting in secret all over the country were holding up their glasses and saying in hushed voices: "To Harry Potter - the boy who lived!

My head is in another dimension. My feet are talking to their soles. My nose is detecting a hint of sweaty, overpumped poon. There's a spider corpse perpetually hanging on the wall next to my pillow that I don't have any desire to correct. My breath smells like Kuwait. My arms are doing the Crazy Granny Dance, and my hips are just plain jealous. I was born across the pond from a heretic's womb, and fathered by an equally atrocious Sinatra-obsessed lion tamer. If these are all the symptoms of a world-famous record producer whose lover has just ditched him for a career in straight porn, then becometh I the sum of all homoerotic fears. Now fetch me more scotch and someone to make use of my erection, preferably with their mouth."---Wolfgang Stephanopolis

Hello," Life says, "Remember me?We started out together hereWhen you were just a bundleOf innocent amazement.Remember how you saw the worldWith nothing but wonder?We were such rowdy playmates then.We painted on the sky with cloudsAnd made magic out of Clothespins and peanut butter.Remember, can you, how I became stained and heavyWith trouble?Not safe now. Lots of no.They dressed me in painful clothesAnd made you wear them, too.You don't recognize me, do youBut I've never abandoned youOr lost my wild, happy desireTo show you Play with youKiss youHide and seek down twisty pathsAnd always discover more.Want to run away with me again?Shall we elope without ever leavingBecause that's possible, you know.I've never been anywhere but hereWaiting for youTo remember.

The day I became a writerit wasn't the day a whore paid me in sexin exchange for one of my bookswhich happened often and more and moreas time went onit wasn't the first time someone actually paid for one of my bookswhich happens less and less as time goes onIt was the day I realizedthat everything is created by manGod, Satan, Judas, phobias, excrement, even deatheven womeneverything is created by manSo I said to myselfshit, let me make something let me tape together some words and sentencesand proseand predicatesand the residual shit that sticks to my ass after I wipeand compose a new kind of thingBut then I realized that others had discovered thisfor themselves as wellAnd suddenly the world became a jungleWhere everyone eats each other aliveAnd shits out the same shit

Nos-tal-gic,’ Akira said, as though it were a word he had been struggling to find. Then he said a word in Japanese, perhaps the Japanese for ‘nostalgic.’ ‘Nos-tal-gic. It is good to be nos-tal-gic. Very important.’‘Really, old fellow?’‘Important. Very important. Nostalgic. When we nostalgic, we remember. A world better than this world we discover when we grow. We remember and wish good world come back again. So very important. Just now, I had dream. I was boy. Mother, Father, close to me. in our house.’He fell silent and continued to gaze across the rubble.‘Akira,’ I said, sensing that the longer this talk went on, the greater was some danger I did not wish fully to articulate. ‘We should move on. We have much to do.

We all wear masksto veil the truth.Truth is nakedness.Truth is fear.Truth is the gardener making you sit on his lapasking you tolight his cigarette.Truth is father— with a limp cigarette on his lips —telling you to never use his matches to light it for him.Truth is father yelling:"It is not nice for little girls to do so”.Truth is a curious girlwanting to ignite a matchlike a woman.Truth is the maid watching from the kitchen,knowing.But knowing isn’t truth.Truth is the maid calling:Come. Come.Truth is the gardener understanding. But understanding isn’t truth.Truth is the maid saying,"Stay away!"Truth is a girl thinking she is in control.That nothing happened, nothing bad.But the truest truthis a girl knowing, a girl understanding thaton that daysomeone stole a little piece of her truth.

The others cast themselves down upon the fragrant grass, but Frodo stood awhile still lost in wonder. It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name. All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at once clear cut, as if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured for ever. He saw no colour but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful. In winter here no heart could mourn for summer or for spring. No blemish or sickness or deformity could be seen in anything that grew upon the earth. On the land of Lórien, there was no stain.

...I'm a fool. I expect too much, then I'm angry because nothing ever works out the way I want. When I was young and full of hopes and aspirations, I didn't know I would get hurt so often. I think I'll get tough and won't ache again, then my fragile shell shatters, and again, symbolically, my blood is spilled with the tears I shed. I pull myself back together again, go on, convince myself there is a reason for everything, and at some point in my life it will be disclosed. And when I have what I want, I hope to god it stays long enough to let me know I have it, and it wont hurt when it goes, for I don't expect it to stay, not now. I'm like a doughnut, always being punch out in the middle, and constantly I go around searching for the missing piece, and on and on it goes, never ending, only beginning...

The echo of two boys playing in a pool testing each other to see who could hold their breath the longest.… Whadda ya wanna do now?— I know, we could wrestle like the Roman gladiators— Okay— What do we fight for?— Loser has to do the victor’s homework for a week— Nah, raise the stakes. Loser has to suck the victor’s johnny— Trenton recalled the long ago memory of two boys wrestling, butt naked in the back yard and the battle went on forever locked in each other’s grip. A stalemate tangle in each other’s arm. And they kissed finding each other’s tongue. The taste of it so good and frightening at the same time and they pulled apart fearfully— Deez— Yeah Trent— I don’t think we should tell anyone about this, okay? — Yeah okay—

This was when he first suspected that the kindly child-loving God extolled by his headmistress might not exist. As it turned out, most major world events suggested the same. But for Theo’s sincerely godless generation, the question hasn’t come up. No one in his bright, plate-glass, forward-looking school ever asked him to pray, or sing an impenetrable cheery hymn. There’s no entity for him to doubt. His initiation, in front of the TV, before the dissolving towers, was intense but he adapted quickly. These days he scans the papers for fresh developments the way he might a listings magazine. As long as there’s nothing new, his mind is free. International terror, security cordons, preparations for war — these represent the steady state, the weather. Emerging into adult consciousness, this is the world he finds.

He asked her, 'Why do you feel sorry for me, Old Woman?'The Old Woman stood beside him and looked out the window at the Garden, so beautiful, flowering and everywhere illuminated by the rays of the setting sun, and said, 'I feel sorry for you, dear Youth, because I know where you are gazing and what you are waiting for. I feel sorry for you and your mother.'Perhaps because of these words, or perhaps because of something else, there was a change in the Youth's mood. The Garden, flowering behind the high fence below his window, and exuding a wonderful fragrance, suddenly seemed somehow strange to him; and an ominous sensation, a sudden fear, gripped his heart with a violent palpitation, like heady and languid fragrances rising from brilliant flowers.'What is happening?' he wondered in confusion.("The Poison Garden")

MCMXIVThose long uneven linesStanding as patientlyAs if they were stretched outsideThe Oval or Villa Park,The crowns of hats, the sunOn moustached archaic facesGrinning as if it were allAn August Bank Holiday lark;And the shut shops, the bleachedEstablished names on the sunblinds,The farthings and sovereigns,And dark-clothed children at playCalled after kings and queens,The tin advertisementsFor cocoa and twist, and the pubsWide open all day--And the countryside not caring:The place names all hazed overWith flowering grasses, and fieldsShadowing Domesday linesUnder wheat's restless silence;The differently-dressed servantsWith tiny rooms in huge houses,The dust behind limousines;Never such innocence,Never before or since,As changed itself to pastWithout a word--the menLeaving the gardens tidy,The thousands of marriages,Lasting a little while longer:Never such innocence again.

If someone had told Allie that she would commit a premeditated act of murder, she would not have believed it. She would have spouted off all the reasons how she could never be capable of such a thing—that no matter how dire the circumstances, she would find a better way. She was so naive, so arrogant to think that the laws of necessity and unthinkable circumstance could not apply to her. She could tell herself that this was an act of mercy, but that would be a lie. This was an act of war. An act of terrorism. It was nothing less than an assassination.If I do this, Allie told herself, I am no better than Mary. I will have sunk to the worst possible place a person can go. After this moment, I will be a cold-blooded killer and it can never be taken back.So the question was, did Allie Johnson have the strength to sacrifice all that was left of her innocence if it meant she might save the world?

What do you call yourself?" the Fawn said at last. Such a soft sweet voice it had!"I wish I knew!" thought poor Alice. She answered, rather sadly, "Nothing, just now.""Think again," it said: "that won't do."Alice thought, but nothing came of it. "Please, would you tell me what you call yourself?" she said timidly, "I think that might help a little.""I'll tell you, if you'll come a little further on," the Fawn said. "I can't remember here."So they walked on together through the wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they came out into another open field, and here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice's arms. "I'm a Fawn!" it cried out in a voice of delight. "And dear me, you're a human child!" A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed.