Kenny paced along the driveway, kicking stones, saying to himself, “Finish your milk, finish your homework, finish your prayers.” Huffing, exhausted, he slowly chanted, “Dol­phins, dragons, pelicans, trampolines

The girl’s scalp looked as though it had been singed by fire—strands of thatchy red hair snaked away from her face, then settled against her skin, pasted there by sweat and sunscreen and the blown grit and dust of travel.

The last time I'd seen my father he behaved like one of those wolf-boys, those kids suckled and reared in the wild by animals, and I was never sure, during the ten confusing minutes I stood on the lawn outside the house,

He pulled over and walked back and waited for a pause in the traffic and got the phone. It was ringing. “Margaret tells me you won’t be coming home this weekend,” his wife said.

Edgar had been a theology student, and a bicycle messenger, and a junk-bonds trader, and now he was working on his master’s degree. His new ambition was to become a kindergarten teacher. He felt he needed to have a master’s degree in order to teach in a kindergarten.

The last ones to work for dollars aroused hatred in the town, and some were subjected to regrettable acts of retribution.  In our defense, it was an unusual time. 

Jermyn Street, gaslit and foggy on this rainy evening in 1901, pleased Mr. Santayana in its resemblance to a John Atkinson Grimshaw, correct and gratifyingly English

Sometime between the cheese and the fruit, while the port was still being passed, Lieutenant Wilby allowed a sweet, but rather too boisterous fart to slip between his buttocks. 

Towards the end the Gls at Nuremberg played basketball almost around the clock, it seemed. We couldn't see them from our cells, but the percussive bap, bap, bap of the ball on the floor carried to us from the old mess hall where they played. 

The train arrived at about six o’clock on a cold, wet November morning. The fog was so thick it was almost impossible to see. I was wearing my coat collar up and my hat shoved down around my ears, but still the fog penetrated all the way to my bones. The apartment where Leonidas lived was in a neighborhood far from the center of town