The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.
I believe just about anyone can kill in the right circumstances, given enough motivation. The question is, am I there yet? I think I must be.
Well sometimes the sun shines on
Other people’s houses and not mine.
Some days the clouds paint the sky all gray
And it takes away my summertime.
One day, my father walked into his Back Bay apartment to find a blond woman asleep on his couch. Nine months later, I appeared on his doorstep. One year later, my aunts succeeded in getting him committed to a psychiatric hospital.
This is a true story but I can’t believe it’s really happening. It’s a murder story, too, I can’t believe my luck.
The first thing you need to know is that drowning is usually a quiet thing.
“You infernal scoundrel,” Crawford shook his cane menacingly at the president. James Monroe reached for the tongs of the fireplace to defend himself, as Navy Secretary Samuel Southard leaped from his seat and intercepted Crawford, pushing him away from the president’s desk and out the door. It was a terrifying scene: the president—the presidency itself—under attack for the first time in American history.
I’ve hardly been outside my room in days
Cause I don’t feel that I deserve the sunshine’s rays.
On Thursday, a man comes into the store and asks me how to kill his wife. I know, because it’s my business to know, that what he really wants to ask is how to kill his wife and not get caught.
It’s true: the war is rolling toward Berlin. What was yesterday a distant rumble has now become a constant roar.
On September 10, 1976, during an evening flight from New York to Chicago, a bearded passenger handed a sealed envelope to an attendant. The note began: “One, this plane is hijacked.”
They had endured years of waking up alone, making their kids breakfast, taking them to school and picking them up, fixing dinner and kissing them good night, promising that Daddy was thinking of them all the time.
On Tuesday, May 22, 1980, a man named Henry Hill did what seemed to him the only sensible thing to do: he decided to cease to exist.
Like a freeze-dried rose, you will never be,
What you were, what you were to me in memory.
I believe that what separates humanity from everything else in this world — spaghetti, binder paper, deep-sea creatures, edelweiss and Mount McKinley — is that humanity alone has the capacity at any given moment to commit all possible sins.
My father took one hundred and thirty-two minutes to die. I counted.
Probably I would be better off if I didn’t date E women. With me it’s always been Laurie, Jenni, Candy, Maggie, Debbi, Stacey—all my life, just me and the cheerleading squad. You should find yourself a nice A girl, Keeno always tells me.
If you want to feel bad about your looks, spend some time in Seoul.
The flash projected the outline of the hanged man onto the wall.
Your father speaks of his youth with revelry. Spills his life across the table like an overturned drink, covering everything. Your mother doesn’t speak. Any stories of her premarital life come from your father’s mouth.
It began on a train, heading north through England, although I was soon to discover that the story had really begun more than a hundred years earlier.
I’d always thought they would come for me at night, but it was the hottest part of the day when the six men rode onto the plain.
Let’s get something straight, right off the bat: Everything the movies have ever taught you about space travel is garbage.
The kidnapper sounded polite, even deferential, when she called on a Tuesday afternoon last May.
It was a filthy profession, but the money was addicting, and one addiction led to another, and they were all going to hell.