I Have Any Number Of Completely Dark

A Baby Was A Fact. It Was A Being With A Mind And A Nature, And You Could Feel About It Any Way You Liked, But A Baby Wouldn't Care. Just By Existing, It Demanded That You Believe In A Future: The Future It Would Crawl In, Walk In, Live In. A Baby Was A Piece Of Time; It Was A Promise You Made That The World Made Back To You.

I Came To Houston For A Job, The Reason Most People Move Halfway Across The Country With A First Grader And A Five-week-old. I Came Here To Teach At Rice.

In Her Mind's Eye She Saw It, Saw It All At Last: The Rolling Armies And The Flames Of Battle; The Graves And Pits And Dying Cries Of A Hundred Million Souls; The Spreading Darkness, Like A Black Wing Stretching Over The Earth; The Last, Bitter Hours Of Cruelty And Sorrow, And The Terrible, Final Flights; Death's Great Dominion Over All, And, At The Last, Empty Cities, Becalmed By The Silence Of A Hundred Years. Already These Things Were Coming To Pass.

That Literary-popular Distinction Is, In My View, Vastly Overstated. At The Far Poles There Are Clearly Books That Are Purely Commercial And Purely Literary, Written For Audiences That Want To See The Same Thing Enacted Over And Over And Over Again. But The Middle Is Where Most People Read And Most People Write.

He Breathed Once More, Holding The Air In His Chest, As If It Were Not Air But Something More--a Sweet Taste Of Freedom, Of All Cares Lifted, Everything Over And Done.