Good words

People called him a genius, but he didn’t see it that way. He certainly didn’t feel superior to anyone. It was only that his brain seemed to operate on a different, far less comfortable frequency than others’.

“Professors,” Mr. Flogg murmured in a tone recognizable to anyone who has had an essay returned to them covered in red ink.

Her father once told her casually that she was built like a plum on toothpicks, and the phrase was at once so cruel and so poetic that it clicked into place around her like a harness.

She’d never been called a nickname before (except in the deep privacy of her own imagination, that is, where she kept a list of suggestions should anyone want one, although no one ever did).

But their characters might have been two roads in a yellow wood: they could not have diverged more.

But then, Devon approached risks the way other people approached a warm, cozy bed at night.

“Old people know things we don’t because long ago, they didn’t listen to their elders either,” Quil said as they ducked into a darkened lean-to filled with moldering hay. “It’s tradition.”

A decade of the soldiers posted in the villages has instilled a healthy dose of fear, coating the villagers’ teeth like a plaque they can taste any time their tongues press up to speak.

I sat in the chair and untangled my consciousness from the cage of my physical self, so that I could run freely in a broad meadow of thoughts, like a romping dog off his leash.