Paul Peterson > Recent Status Updates

"In a Dickens story, readers were not asked to aspire to a higher class or to hate other classes than their own but to find the humanity and the humane in all. This is what made him the world's most famous author."

"And everywhere Rose's gaze of inspection alit, ours following hers a bit apprehensively, some shortfall of housekeeping stood revealed like a museum exhibit of bachelor habits."

"Above all, the flag must never touch the ground. Incalculable consequences blazed up at Carnelia and me from the bright heap of cloth there at our feet. For all we knew, Oklahoma now had to get back in line for statehood."

"Besides, Father more than once had warned us not to get our hopes up too high, although plainly his were elbowing the moon."

"He scanned the table in beleaguered fashion. 'Is anyone else going to take mercy on that last Missouri T-bone?' Rae passed him the final chicken drumstick."

"As long as General Lee's name is remembered that of his gray war-horse "Traveller" will be lovingly associated with it....The qualities which have endeared General Lee to so many -- courage, bravery, gentleness, fidelity, and fortitude -- these qualities were shared by "Traveller", the friend and companion and faithful servant of his master, and for these things he too shall be remembered."

"So the feeling of pleasure slips into the feeling that time has passed, that it is very long ago, and the sudden feeling of being old."
"I can't recall when I last felt so alive as when I got the car onto the road again and drove on. Everything that was me lay taut and quivering just beneath my skin."

"Time is important to me now, I tell myself. Not that it should pass quickly or slowly, but be only time, be something I live inside and fill with physical things and activities that I can divide it up by, so that it grows distinct to me and does not vanish when I am not looking."

"The zelandonia were relieved. The First had managed to take what at first seemed like a basic conflict of beliefs, told by Ayla with such credible conviction that it could almost create a schism, and instead blend them together. Her interpretation added strength to their beliefs rather than tearing them apart. They could, perhaps, accept that the ones they called Flatheads were intelligent in their own way..."

"Their memories go back a long way. IN certain circumstances they can go back to their beginnings, to a time so long ago, there were no people and the earth was different. Perhaps back to the time when the Great Earth Mother gave birth to her son and first made the land green with her birth waters. Creb had the ability to direct the other mog-urs and lead them back to those times."