It was not that he was feckless, more that he had simply not been around the day they handed out feck.
It was not that he was feckless, more that he had simply not been around the day they handed out feck.
Coraline shivered. She preferred her other mother to have a location: if she were nowhere, then she could be anywhere. And, after all, it is always easier to be afraid of something you cannot see.
Agnes was the worst prophet that's ever existed. Because she was always right. That's why the book never sold.
The cafe door opened. A young man in dusty white leathers entered, and the wind blew in empty crisp packets and newspapers and ice cream wrappers in with him. They danced around his feet like excited children, then fell exhausted to the floor.
She had forgotten them all; forgotten Richard down in the mud, and the marquis and his foolish crossbow, and the world. She was delighted and transported, in a perfect place, the world she lived for. Her world contained two things: Hunter, and the Beast. The Beast knew that too. It was the perfect match, the hunter and the hunted. And who was who, and which was which, only time would reveal; time and the dance.
And, too ignorant to be scared, too young to be awed, Tristan Thorn traveled beyond the fields we know...
They kissed for the first time then in the cold spring rain, though neither one of them now knew that it was raining. Tristran's heart pounded in his chest as if it was not big enough to contain all the joy that it held. He opened his eyes as he kissed the star. Her sky-blue eyes stared back into his, and in her eyes he could see no parting from her.
It is neither fair nor unfair, Nobody Owens. It simply is
We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.
It would have been hard for Fat Charlie to say exactly when the accumulation of birds on the wire mesh moved from interesting to terrifying. It was somewhere in the first hundred or so, anyway. And it was in the way they didn't coo, or caw, or trill, or song. They simply landed on the wire, and they watched him.
Her other mother smiled brightly and the hair on her head drifted like plants under the sea.
America was, to them, the place that good people went to when they died. They were prepared to believe just about anything could happen in America.
The ducks in St James's Park are so used to being fed bread by secret agents meeting clandestinely that they have developed their own Pavlovian reaction. Put a St James's Park duck in a laboratory cage and show it a picture of two men -- one usually wearing a coat with a fur collar, the other something sombre with a scarf -- and it'll look up expectantly.
So many things to see, people to do.
Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets.
Tristan and Yvaine were happy together. Not forever-after, for Time, the thief, eventually takes all things into his dusty storehouse, but they were happy, as these things go, for a long while
It's just harder out there in the world of the living, and we cannot protect you out there as easily. I wanted to keep you perfectly safe...But there is only one perfectly safe place for your kind, and you will not reach it until all your adventures are over and none of them matter any longer.
Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.
It's easier to lie to yourself when you say things out loud.
Here you go, she said. I don't need it anymore. I'm very grateful. I think it may have saved my life, saved some other people's death.
And then he'd tried to become an official Atheist and hadn't got the rock-hard self-satisfied strength of belief even for that.
The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.
The boy had the towering arrogance only seen in the greatest of artists and all nine-year-old boys.
Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.
What need, Dunstan wondered, could someone have of the storm-filled eggshells?
Not gay, just never met the right woman.
You are obvious, boy. You are difficult to miss. If you came to me in company with a purple lion, a green elephant, and a scarlet unicorn astride which was the King of England in his Royal Robes, I do believe that it is you and you alone that people would stare at, dismissing the others as minor irrelevancies.
It's not sipping wine. It's a mourning wine. You drain it. Like this.
I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn't mean anything? What then?
Death and Famine and War and Pollution continued biking towards Tadfield. And Grievous Bodily Harm, Cruelty To Animals, Things Not Working Properly Even After You've Given Them A Good Thumping but secretly No Alcohol Lager, and Really Cool People travelled with them.
Why are we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that.
The next morning he boarded the train for the six-hour journey south that would bring him to the strange gothic spires and arches of St. Pancras Station. His mother gave him a small walnut cake that she had made for the journey and a thermos filled with tea; and Richard Mayhew went to London feeling like hell.
He entertained these thoughts awkwardly, as a man entertains unexpected guests. Then, as he reached his objective, he pushed these thoughts away, as a man apologizes to his guests, and leaves them, muttering something about a prior engagement.
While clothes do not, as the saying would sometimes have it, make the man, and fine feathers do not make fine birds, sometimes they can add a certain spice to a recipe.
People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer.
You can't trust other people. If it's important, you have to do it yourself.
Let's start a new tomorrow, today.
I don'w want whatever I want. Nobody does. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted?
Hell may have all the best composers, but heaven has all the best choreographers.
You don't have to test everything to destruction just to see if you made it right.
The only advice I can give you is what you're telling yourself. Only, maybe you're too scared to listen.
He shivered. His coat was thin, and it was obvious he would not get his kiss, which he found puzzling. The manly heroes of the penny dreadfuls and shilling novels never had these problems getting kissed.
You have to believe. Otherwise, it will never happen.
Rain in the graveyard, and the world puddled into blurred reflections.
You're alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you can change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you're dead, it's gone. Over. You've made what you've made, dreamed your dream, written your name. You may be buried here, you may even walk. But that potential is finished.
Of course, everyone's parents are embarrassing. It goes with the territory. The nature of parents is to embarrass merely by existing, just as it is the nature of children of a certain age to cringe with embarrassment, shame, and mortification should their parents so much as speak to them on the street.
I was kidnapped by aliens, they came down from outer space with ray guns, but I fooled them by wearing a wig and laughing in a foreign accent, and I escaped.
If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boy and his dog and his friends. And a summer that never ends.
For a moment he thought she was about to hit him, which would have been bad, or even start crying, which would have been much, much worse.
The price of getting what you want is getting what once you wanted.
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories