Well, that is the first mystery; what had become of the English general’s head? The second riddle is, what had become of the Brazilian general’s heart?

he old, heavy Colonel Newcome fashion

outside

Father Brown repressed what appeared to be a momentary disposition to dance on the now sunlit lawn and cried quite piteously, like a child, “Oh, let me be silly a little. You don’t know how unhappy I have been. And now I know that there has been no deep sin in this business at all. Only a little lunacy, perhaps—and who minds that?”

Have you ever noticed this—that people never answer what you say? They answer what you mean—or what they think you mean.

What do you call a man who wants to embrace the chimney-sweep?” “A saint,” said Father Brown. “I think,” said Sir Leopold, with a supercilious smile, “that Ruby means a Socialist.”

“The murderer,” went on Brown quietly, “hacked off his enemy’s head and flung the sword far over the wall. But he was too clever to fling the sword only. He flung the head over the wall also. Then he had only to clap on another head to the corpse, and (as he insisted on a private inquest) you all imagined a totally new man.”

The borderland of the brain, where all the monsters are made, moved horribly in the Gaelic O’Brien. He felt the chaotic presence of all the horse-men and fish-women that man’s unnatural fancy has begotten. A voice older than his first fathers seemed saying in his ear: “Keep out of the monstrous garden where grows the tree with double fruit. Avoid the evil garden where died the man with two heads.” Yet, while these shameful symbolic shapes passed across the ancient mirror of his Irish soul

“In that case,” cried Valentin, with a dreadful smile, “you may indeed know a great deal about him. About his life and about his—”

“I’ll show you,” said his servant, and reappeared with a flashing naked cavalry sabre, streaked with blood about the point and edge. Everyone in the room eyed it as if it were a thunderbolt; but the experienced Ivan went on quite quietly: “I found this,” he said, “flung among the bushes fifty yards up the road to Paris. In other words, I found it just where your respectable Mr. Brayne threw it when he ran away.”

rising above your lower dignity

They saw the proud, white face of the Scotch aristocrat and her lover, the Irish adventurer, like old portraits in a dark house. The long silence was full of formless historical memories of murdered husbands and poisonous paramours.

“I think I can tell you,” cried Lady Margaret, in that clear, quivering voice with which a courageous woman speaks publicly. “I can tell you what Mr. O’Brien was doing in the garden, since he is bound to silence. He was asking me to marry him. I refused; I said in my family circumstances I could give him nothing but my respect. He was a little angry at that; he did not seem to think much of my respect. I wonder,” she added, with rather a wan smile, “if he will care at all for it now. For I offer it him now. I will swear anywhere that he never did a thing like this.”

“Why,” he gasped, “it’s—no, it isn’t; it can’t be. Do you know this man, sir?”

The head fell away. It had been entirely sundered from the body; whoever had cut his throat had managed to sever the neck as well.

alentin was expecting, for special reasons, a man of world-wide fame, whose friendship he had secured during some of his great detective tours and triumphs in the United States. He was expecting Julius K. Brayne, that multi-millionaire whose colossal and even crushing endowments of small religions have occasioned so much easy sport and easier solemnity for the American and English papers.

He liked anything that he thought “progressive.” He thought Valentin “progressive,” thereby doing him a grave injustice.

He had left his country after some crash of debts, and now expressed his complete freedom from British etiquette by swinging about in uniform, sabre and spurs.

Perhaps such scientific natures have some psychic prevision of the most tremendous problem of their lives.

He was one of the great humanitarian French freethinkers; and the only thing wrong with them is that they make mercy even colder than justice.

making some last arrangements about executions and such ugly things; and though these duties were rootedly repulsive to him, he always performed them with precision.

no ultimate exit at all except through this front door, which was guarded by Ivan and the armoury

Valentin’s house was perhaps as peculiar and celebrated as its master.

“Oh, one’s little flock, you know!” said Father Brown,

such a silly sheep as the man with the umbrella and the parcels.

The two figures that they followed were crawling like black flies

A perfect dome of peacock-green sank into gold amid the blackening trees and the dark violet distances. The glowing green tint was just deep enough to pick out in points of crystal one or two stars. All that was left of the daylight lay in a golden glitter across the edge of Hampstead and that popular hollow which is called the Vale of Health.

“The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic,” he said with a sour smile

when he could not follow the train of the reasonable, he coldly and carefully followed the train of the unreasonable.

brainless phrase of modern fatalism and materialism.

I have seen both these things myself within the last few days.

Valentin was a sceptic in the severe style of France, and could have no love for priests.

and a very short Roman Catholic priest going up from a small Essex village. When it came to the last case, Valentin gave it up and almost laughed. The little priest was so much the essence of those Eastern flats; he had a face as round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling; he had eyes as empty as the North Sea; he had several brown paper parcels, which he was quite incapable of collecting.

Flambeau was a figure as statuesque and international as the Kaiser

There was nothing about him to indicate the fact that the grey jacket covered a loaded revolver, that the white waistcoat covered a police card, or that the straw hat covered one of the most powerful intellects in Europe.

Between the silver ribbon of morning and the green glittering ribbon of sea, the boat touched Harwich and let loose a swarm of folk like flies, among whom the man we must follow was by no means conspicuous—nor wished to be.

Unlock

probably for a bit too long

We knew the scars you can’t see are the ones that last

It holds the elbow joint in place for fine movements, such as writing. This is our writing muscle.

The forest hid them, but it could do nothing for the inside of Maira’s ears. From where she and her sister buried themselves for hours, she heard the screams of women and children as the soldiers plucked boys and girls from their homes, dragged the little ones through the mountains to enact the horrors we would one day read in newspapers: raping the children, throwing them onto trucks, into helicopters, into mass graves, and sometimes, yes sometimes, selling the children to childless couples, making infants and toddlers and older children, too, gifts from the mountains to military wives

and a grandfather she does not like

But there is something wonderful in watching a figure emerge from the stone unsummoned, feeling the presence of something within you, the writer, and also beyond you – something consistent, wilful, and benevolent, that seems to have a plan, which seems to be: to lead you to your own higher ground

So: the book would be narrated by a group of monologuing ghosts stuck in that graveyard.

We often think that the empathetic function in fiction is accomplished via the writer’s relation to his characters, but it’s also accomplished via the writer’s relation to his reader

She tweaks that which she’s already done

be less lame

Simply knowing one’s intention and then executing it does not make good art.

as if I were in control of it.

Many bells ring.)

Two, actually. One of them's pregnant, and Stephanie

My husband

It's all in the timing.

boring

Oral Roberts University

mind

taken

tombs

as if even to have heard that much might have put us at risk of whatever fate questions like that                                      spring from

year

Am I t

in wonder of her.

garden of insults

long a kind of secular Mecca for my family

but they aren’t proven to increase the total time or quality of sleep

It is considered a dietary supplement and therefore held to essentially no premarket standards of quality, safety, or efficacy

alive

Caffeine is the most consumed stimulant in the world

As an experiment for his high-school science fair in 1964, a 17-year-old San Diego boy named Randy Gardner stayed awake for 264 hours

When we get fewer than seven hours, we’re impaired (to degrees that vary from person to person)

Insufficient sleep causes many chronic and acute medical conditions that have an enormous impact on quality of life, not to mention the economy

Sleep experts often liken sleep-deprived people to drunk drivers: They don’t get behind the wheel thinking they’re probably going to kill someone. But as with drunkenness, one of the first things we lose in sleep deprivation is self-awareness

I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking

Becky had started to keep a journal when Jude’s condition was diagnosed

Anything that could go wrong—a marriage, a child, a medical treatment, a painting, an affair, a tree—started with hope. The only option was to blunder on through hoping

For these comforts, Jude must have been given to her as a punishment

No one would know that she was risking her life for this belief: Who knows better’n I do what normal is?

They, with their limited imaginations, wanted to change their children. Vandalism, Ossie Gulliver had said in front of the Jackson Pollock painting. Parents like them committed vandalism out of love and despair.

witness to a crime

Is this the little girl I carried? Is this the little boy at play? I don’t remember growing older . . . when did they?

be

Vivien’s mother sat with an erect back in another armchair, her creased face showing little acknowledgment of the conversation. Becky could not tell if she was black or Native American or Latina—perhaps she was all three. There was no photograph in the living room that Becky could use to make out the family’s story. All she knew was that the old woman had raised a musician. Perhaps she would not question herself all the time about failing at motherhood.

The thought of letting the plums rot made Becky feel guilty

She needed all the evidence to show that they did what they could for Jude. People in the same boat, she noticed, often found more reasons to judge and to denounce.

Oh, Becky thought. Perhaps others would have recognized him right away from his outfit

He took a pipe out of his pocket

febrile

Oh, the places he’ll not go, and the things he’ll miss in life!

Max’s boss, the chief of cardiology at the hospital and a longtime friend of the woman on the stage, had purchased two tables

Becky was good at uncovering nonexistent motivations in her actions.

Becky’s hope was that someday Jude would read her journal and recognize what he would miss if he didn’t pay attention to people.

SpongeBob