It was not a world in which it was advisable to take risks.
It could be argued - had been, by a few scholars, in the deep and distant past, a more romantic age - that risks were always inadvisable, that this was what made them risks in the first place.
But those scholars didn't live here, they didn't live now, they were from a world of chivalry and knights and heroism.
They were not in a world where you were burned if you were caught.
There were marks all over her arms - his, too, they sat beside one...
My best friend is a guy called Peter and he's incredible at talking to people. He has a vault of information in his head that he's gotten from all of his past conversations with people. When he meets someone new he merely tells them what he knows so far about their hometown and then lets them build upon it, this he'll take to the next person he meets from there and so on. I was with him the other day and we were talking to a guy from south africa, we live in australia, and the guy was used to...
The day after tomorrow, this will be all over. The waiting, the anxiety, the impatience will end. I have paced my room nearly every minute of every day, waiting...waiting. But, it will soon be all over.
I cannot imagine how I will feel. Will it be like the first time, or even the second? I highly doubt it. The first was special, sent a tingle up and down me when it arrived. The second was nearly as powerful, but still less so.
So, it wan't be like that. But, I still cannot wait.
I have He-Man and Battlecat.
I have...
It was cold. Freezing, really. There at the stoop, on the street, glowing in red. Dark, straight hair raking her face. She shivered, stood and walked down the street. To me, this place is foreign. To her, she knows the environment like the stories her mother told her. She walks down the road away from the doorway. Where they threw her out. Spit on her. But now she walks down the road trying to keep warm. She coughs. The shivers shake her again. The cold day drops her onto the street, rejecting her and the brightness of her clothes. The...
Like a breeze through the willows, was what she was thinking. The way he passed through her life. She shrugged, thinking if all it was was a summer romance, it had star quality. Long walks on the beach, starlit nights, hand-holding over glasses of wine at the little Italian restaurant long after the staff wanted to leave. They had so much together; they had seemed to be so connected.
And then he was gone. She had gone to his beach house that morning, the air starting to chill a bit with the coming of fall. The door was unlocked, and...
Gigantic.
That was the only way she could describe it. A gigantic mistake.
He had seemed like an excellent choice. A little daring, a little dangerous, but still good-looking. Still smart. Law-school bound and blonde, he could have been taken home.
Waking up in an historic apartment in the Highlands the morning after the Kentucky Derby was romantic. Especially on such a sunny. He pointed out the dog walkers while still wrapped up in white sheets.
She should have never said she knew what she was doing.
We sit in white rooms now, spartan furnishings, novel-sized windows. The tea is warm yet still melts the chocolate. Today they let us hear a bird song. The leap of its whistle reminded me of something that used to occur, when things used to occur.
Kenya. She said her name was Kenya.
And then she laughed. I couldn't hear it, not over the music in the bar, not over the shouting of everyone around us. But I saw the laugh, starting in her stomach, and traveling up and out of her mouth.
She leaned closer and said that her parents had grown up with Black Power and Africa awareness, and decided to name her Kenya. That they had grounded her the first time she straightened her hair.
Her voice, the part of her voice I could hear, had a huskiness to it that really appealed...
The dystopia is a genre of fiction designed to teach a lesson about society by imaging a future society warped in some terrible way. The interesting thing about dystopian novels is their reliance on a single, antagonistic character to provide a terrible monologue of exposition to the horrified protagonist, explaining just how and why society went bad, and why the system must persist.
George Orwell's 1984 has O'brien, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World has Mustafa Mond, and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 has Captain Beatty, the remarkably well-read "fireman" who has turned his back on all that literature had to offer...
Spinning this wasn't going to be easy, Simon thought, suddenly conscious of his thumping heartbeat. What on earth was going to come out of his mouth? Oh well, sometimes you just have to plunge in and have faith that the words will come.
He stepped out of the wings and into the bright floodlights, smiling his confident way up to the podium. "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen," he began. "Many of you will have seen the election results by now. . ."