Hush

He expected too much from people, that was the problem, Ethan thought. He expected too much from life.

Music is art, and art is an integral part of the human experience.

She hadn’t known she was a cat person

Socrates said the perfect society would be based on a great lie. People would be told that lie from the cradle, and they would believe it, because human beings need to make order out of chaos. Ivy

Ivy Dunlap lacked the credentials to create any kind of a buzz. What a sad commentary on the United States. The same book, written by Claudia Reynolds, would have produced a media frenzy. Mary

And if he had lived, he would have been tall and strong, weak and wise. He would have needed me, and he would have pushed me away.

Here’s a little-known fact: People who are getting close to snapping sometimes start wearing the color yellow. The brighter the color, the closer they are to snapping.

She thought about her future. For sixteen years, she’d lived for one thing and one thing only, and now her life seemed superfluous. What would she do? Take care of Jinx. And every day she would go over questions that had haunted man since the beginning of time. What am I doing here? Who am I? What’s my purpose? Those

He put his coffee cup aside and got to his feet. She thought he was leaving when he pulled her into his arms and held her close. Just held her, held her, held her.

I want to do comparison studies on the test results of adolescents who attend school in buildings with natural light and those of children who learn under artificial light. I’m hoping to prove the natural-light students do better.

Ten years ago, it was speculated that there were fifty serial killers working in the United States at any given time.

When you’re young, you keep thinking things are going to change, things are going to get better. But by the time you hit forty, you pretty much know this is it. When

When people raised families in that sterile environment, it produced directionless children who became directionless teenagers, then directionless adults. With no roots, no past to stand on, you got hollow kids. The United States was full of rootless, empty kids who played video games all day. In between, they skateboarded down immaculate sidewalks past yards that had never known a weed. And if you looked into their eyes, you didn’t see a dream of the future there, just a weird emptiness. Max didn’t know what the answer was; all he knew was that somewhere along the line, they’d all taken a wrong turn. Max

He didn’t know why everybody thought he liked guys. But he didn’t like girls either. He hated everybody equally. Above

after you watch someone die of cancer, you’re forever changed. Your view of humanity, of what it means to be a human on this planet Earth, is forever questioned and never answered.

That was his problem. Words, ideas, eating away at him. He didn’t like it, this thinking. He envied his friends who didn’t seem to think at all. Or were they faking it too, just like him? As

The noise. The chaos. Had it always been this bad? Cars honking, sirens blaring, the shriek of bus brakes, and the smell of diesel when the huge vehicle pulled away from the curb? Construction, wood-planked walkways, jackhammers. How did people stand it? How did they think? Function? The

People who are getting close to snapping sometimes start wearing the color yellow. The brighter the color, the closer they are to snapping.

On her sixteenth birthday, she bought a lottery ticket and won half a million dollars. But later the money was taken away because she hadn’t been old enough to buy a ticket in the first place. Strange

Her good fortune, while not exactly making her shallow, had given her an insulated view from a window she didn’t care to move past.

after a kid reached age twelve, you were on your own. You wouldn’t find pot smoking or sex next to diaper rash. But

one of his favorite books was The Runaway Bunny. He especially liked the part about the mother bunny finding her baby wherever he went, no matter how lost he was, or how far away he wandered. Barefoot,

Because that’s the way it was with many serial killers. They blended. They moved among the masses, changing color to match their background. Ivy

Max could see by his eyes that he was losing him. Ethan was imagining a talented mother, a brilliant father. How could he get through to him? How could he make him see how much he meant to him? How could he possibly make him believe it?

Max knew Ethan didn’t want to be seen crying, and Max wanted to respect his privacy, but he couldn’t let the evening end like this, not without telling his son one final thing, the unabashed, unvarnished truth. “I adopted you because Cecilia begged me to,” Max said from the doorway. “But sometimes fortune falls on those who least expect it. I’m one of those people. You brought something into my life that had been lacking. You are my son. I love you more than I can ever say. And I can’t begin to comprehend how empty my life would be without you in it.

Galaxy 500′s cover of Yoko Ono’s Listen, the Snow Is Falling, or Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, The Chambermaids Down in the Berries,

How easy it was to disturb someone with just a few words, words that didn’t fit the protocol. Humans came with a manual, a set of rules, a code that saturated every waking moment of their pitiful lives. But if you stepped outside that code, it threw people off because there was nothing in the manual about seriously fucking with somebody’s head.

When people raised families in that sterile environment, it produced directionless children who became directionless teenagers, then directionless adults. With no roots, no past to stand on, you got hollow kids. The

And after you watch someone die of cancer, you’re forever changed. Your view of humanity, of what it means to be a human on this planet Earth, is forever questioned and never answered.