He'd learned long ago: perfection isn't what families are all about.
I know a lot of Eastern Europeans, and because of what they have been through and what they have seen, they have an attitude where they are not easily fooled.
Like most-maybe all- writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, by reading books.
All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another.
Too often students are being taught to read as if literature were some kind of ethics class or civics class—or worse, some kind of self-help manual. In fact, the important thing is the way the writer uses the language.
With this recitation of paraphernalia and detritus, O'Brien manages to encapsulate the experience of an army and of a particular war, of a mined and booby-trapped landscape, of cold nights and hot days, of soaking monsoons and rice paddies, and of the possibility of being shot, like Ted Lavender, suddenly and out of nowhere: not only in the middle of a sentence but in the midst of a subordinate clause.
When we humans speak, we are not merely communicating information but attempting to make an impression and achieve a goal.
A wounded deer leaps the highest.
You think you know how this story is going to end, but you don't.
It is a revolutionary experience. That's the best way I can describe it. It transforms you completely, in a second. Nature is very wise and gives you nine months to prepare, but in that moment-when you see that face, you are transformed forever.
A dim antagonism gathered force within him and darkened his mind as a cloud against her disloyalty: and when it passed, cloudlike, leaving his mind serene and dutiful towards her again, he was made aware dimly and without regret of a first noiseless sundering of their lives.