This article will not restore your faith in humanity. Nor will it amaze, stun, delight, shock, charm, or in any literal or figurative way, blow your mind.
If you like to worry about things—and most people do—you are living at a great time.
The men pack the witch’s mouth with rags. The time for confessions has come and gone.
“Where’s Papa going with that ax?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
Evelyn was an insomniac so when they say she died in her sleep, you have to question that.
I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.
The room is never anything o’clock.
Minutes slip through it like a thief in gloves. Hours fail even to raise the dust. Outside, deadlines expire. Buzzers erupt. Deals build to their frenzied conclusions. But in this chamber, now and forever combine.
One of the most surreal experiences about spending time in a country that is at its core still a military dictatorship is sitting down to read the morning paper.
Just because I own slaves doesn’t mean I’m racist.
It’s 3:35 a.m. in the morning. I am standing in an open doorway, peering into a dark wood, wearing only a pair of thermal long johns. Snow is drifting onto my face from a moonlit sky. My heart is pounding. And I am holding an axe.
The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
The flash projected the outline of the hanged man onto the wall.
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.
Let’s get something straight, right off the bat: Everything the movies have ever taught you about space travel is garbage.
It was a filthy profession, but the money was addicting, and one addiction led to another, and they were all going to hell.