For as long as I can remember, I remember fear.
None of the merry-go-rounds seem to work anymore. There is a Holiday Inn across from the coroner’s office. And Lorenzo Jones is our mayor.
They said I must die. They said that I stole the breath from men, and now they must steal mine.
I am a coward.
I wanted to be heroic and I pretended I was. I have always been good at pretending.
The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years—if it ever did end—began, so far as I can know or tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.
[Acknowledgments] We would like to thank everyone who helped us, or, at least, who did not slow us down too much.
Scientific revolutions, almost by definition, defy common sense. If all our common-sense notions about the universe were correct, then science would have solved the secrets of the universe thousands of years ago.
Beginnings, it’s said, are apt to be shadowy. So it is with this story, which starts with the emergence of a new species maybe two hundred thousand years ago. The species does not yet have a name—nothing does—but it has the capacity to name things.
Tears flowed out of me from a walled-off place, from another time, from a little boy who couldn’t cry.
Usually people cried when they came here for the first time, and this girl looked as if she’d be no exception.
I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.
Dear You, The body you are wearing used to be mine. The scar on the inner left thigh is there because I fell out of a tree and impaled my leg at the age of nine.
I don’t know if my story is grand enough to be a tragedy, although a lot of shitty stuff did happen.
I am a lawyer, and I am in prison. It’s a long story.
Archie Sheridan had a paper birthday hat on his head and six bullets in his front pocket. The bullets rattled when he moved, making a clinking sound that no one else seemed able to hear.
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
The forest was black and Darko was afraid to enter.
Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.
It was Mum who kept trying to make a lady of me through all my growing-up years but it was Grams who taught me her magic tricks and how to be a pickpocket, and of the two of them I have to say that Grams’ lessons certainly proved the more valuable to me in my life.
When I was born, people in our village commiserated with my mother and nobody congratulated my father.
Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast.
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
My father’s wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place and see what might be in it for us.
Warning!!! This self-serving celebrity autobiography is different from other self-serving celebrity autobiographies. Because this is a choose-your-own autobiography … and YOU AND YOU ALONE will be responsible for living the life of Neil Patrick Harris.