emily

I'm too much of a coward to kill myself. And too much of a coward to live

I measure every Grief I meetWith narrow, probing, Eyes;I wonder if It weighs like Mine,Or has an Easier size.

She__ my daughter. The only one I have and the only child I__l ever have. I see the fear in her eyes, I sense her hesitancy, but when I get her to smile it makes up for all those moments in between. I got this one chance. My last chance. I don__ want to blow what little time I have left with her so no, I don__ want anyone rocking her world.

I like people with depth, I like people with emotion, I like people with a strong mind, an interesting mind, a twisted mind, and also people that can make me smile.

The greater the injury, the greater the fun.

It was not, of course, a proper thing to do. But then I have never pretended, nor will ever pretend, that Emily was a proper child. Books are not written about proper children. They would be so dull nobody would read them.

He caught her bythe shoulders and gave her a hard little shake. "Do you think you're so charming in that silly little nightdress that I can't resist tumbling you? Do you think I have no pride when it comes to you?""B-b-but I_""Well, you're right," he shouted. "I don't!"With that, his lips came down on hers

No, scratch the word "career." Careers are for people who wish to advance. I only want to survive, draw a paycheck.

And when I started to cry as I pulled into my driveway,it was coming down hard enough that I could pretend that it was only the rain hitting my face, and not the fact that I'd just lost another friend.

He was so lonely that he laughed at himself.

I forgot for a second that he was my ancestral enemy, and felt bad for him; then i consoled myself that bird poop brings good luck

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

The following year the house was substantially remodeled, and the conservatory removed. As the walls of the now crumbling wall were being torn down, one of the workmen chanced upon a small leatherbound book that had apparently been concealed behind a loose brick or in a crevice in the wall. By this time Emily Dickinson was a household name in Amherst. It happened that this carpenter was a lover of poetry- and hers in particular- and when he opened the little book and realized that that he had found her diary, he was __eized with a violent trembling,_ as he later told his grandson. Both electrified and terrified by the discovery, he hid the book in his lunch bucket until the workday ended and then took it home. He told himself that after he had read and savored every page, he would turn the diary over to someone who would know how to best share it with the public. But as he read, he fell more and more deeply under the poet__ spell and began to imagine that he was her confidant. He convinced himself that in his new role he was no longer obliged to give up the diary. Finally, having brushed away the light taps of conscience, he hid the book at the back of an oak chest in his bedroom, from which he would draw it out periodically over the course of the next sixty-four years until he had virtually memorized its contents. Even his family never knew of its existence. Shortly before his death in 1980 at the age of eighty-nine, the old man finally showed his most prized possession to his grandson (his only son having preceded him in death), confessing that his delight in it had always been tempered by a nagging guilt and asking that the young man now attempt to atone for his grandfather__ sin. The grandson, however, having inherited both the old man__ passion for poetry and his tendency towards paralysis of conscience, and he readily succumbed to the temptation to hold onto the diary indefinitely while trying to decide what ought to be done with it.

The ghosts of things that never happened are worse than the ghosts of things that did.

You're perfectly safe. Emily is here to protect your virtue." "That's too bad.

It was at that moment, that even though she'd thought it before, Finley realized that Emily was a bloody genius.

You see, we were able to give you something, something which even now no one will ever take from you, and we were able to do that principally by sheltering you. Hailsham would not have been Hailsham if we hadn__. Very well, sometimes that meant we kept things from you, lied to you. Yes, in many ways we fooled you, I suppose you could even call it that. But we sheltered you during those years, and we gave you your childhoods. Lucy was well-meaning enough. But if she__ have her way, your happiness at Hailsham would have been shattered. Look at you both now! I__ so proud to see you both. You built your lives on what we gave you. You wouldn__ be who you are today if we__ not protected you. You wouldn__ have become absorbed in your lessons, you wouldn__ have lost yourselves in your art and your writing. Why should you have done, knowing what lay in store for each of you? You would have told us it was all pointless, and how could we have argued with you? So she had to go.

You see," she concluded miserably, "when I can call like that to him across space--I belong to him. He doesn't love me--he never will--but I belong to him.