Long ago, when I was a junior high school student in America, I remember being taught by a biology teacher that all the chemicals that make up a human body could be bought in a hardware store for $5 or something like that.
Dear Girls, You are prohibited from reading this book until you are twenty-one years old.
That morning, Jim Sams, clever but by no means profound, woke from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic creature.
It was four nights before Christmas Eve, and the city of San Francisco had decked the halls, houses, and grand public edifices in a sparkling, merry Christmas display.
The city looked small on a map of America. It was just a tiny polite dot, near a red threadlike road that ran across an otherwise empty half inch of paper.
For much of the year I had been awaiting the go-ahead on what was potentially one of the most demanding, exhausting, but exhilarating acting roles I’d ever been offered.
Now that people communicate with one another primarily by social media, letter-writing has become a lost art.
OK. Don’t panic. Don’t panic. I’ve got 5 minutes 52 seconds before my basket expires.
My mother has the tenacity of a bulldog, looks like June Cleaver, and curses like a truck driver.
At the end of 1959, aged fifteen, I sat School Certificate. I required two hundred marks from four subjects to pass, and that’s what I managed. One mark less, and my life might have been entirely different.
Only dead people are allowed to have statues, but I have been given one while still alive. Already I am petrified.
There once lived, at a series of temporary addresses across the United States of America, a travelling man of Indian origin, advancing years and retreating mental powers
I had no inkling of how far my rally career would take me when I was a kid.
Later, when people asked about her travels, Sophie would put it simply: the trip to Europe as a bride was hazy in her memory, but she would never forget the voyage home as a widow.
According to Adam Rogers, writing on www.wired.com, humans are fated to see the same world differently:
Dear Mr Wrexham, I know you don’t know me but please, please, please you have to help me
Late on the afternoon of Tuesday the ninth of April in the Year of Our Risen Lord 1468, a solitary traveller was to be observed picking his way on horseback across the wild moorland...
Well, I’m dying! A lot of men make it to the end of their life and they don’t know they’ve reached it.
It would be inaccurate to say that my childhood was normal before they came.
Water closes over the body. Swallows it. The rocking of the boat subsides quickly.
Let’s be honest, not many people come to Wellington for the weather.
They see the fish on their first day, laid bare on the tideline. The seagulls have nearly picked the bones clean already.