Margaret Leigh

What’s one of the hardest things you’ve done, that you’re glad you did?

Even now, at seventeen—high school graduate, mistress of her fate, and a ten-dollar-a-week file clerk in the very Forty-seventh Street lawyer’s office where Helen was a fifteen-dollar-a-week typist—as she sat on Helen’s bed and watched Helen primp for a party, the memory hurt. There was no consolation in the thought that not now and not then would

Colette knows her own strength as a driving examiner is her ability to project calm. She’s like a kind of reverse microwave—molecules slow in her presence.

The habits and tastes of his parents, which had been those of austere children of Bethesda’s particular God, had been stripped with the wallpaper and carpets, and nothing remained of them now but Thomas himself. It was all exactly as he wanted it to be. The oak table by the window was burnished with decades of meals and work, and shone on fat turne

"Archie's got a delightful little mind," Lanfear used to say to me, rather wistfully, "but it's just a highly polished surface held up to the show as it passes. Dredge's mind takes in only a bit at a time, but the bit stays, and other bits are joined to it, in a hard mosaic of fact, of which imagination weaves the pattern. I saw just

In that moment I realized that she was probably quite blameless, always had been, that that long-extinct argument – so powerful, so brutal – was probably quite misleading, that she was simpler than I had supposed, simpler than I was, and that the connections I had made were sometimes skewed, the result of a life spent watching rather than in taking

In Proto–Indo–European religion generally the chasm between gods and humans was bridged by the sanctity of oath–bound contracts and reciprocal obligations, so these were undoubtedly important tools regulating the daily behavior of the powerful toward the weak, at least for people who belonged under the social umbrella. Patron–client systems like th

Other Austen heroines balance such feelings with well-developed, even if sometimes mistaken, ideas for making sense of the world and guiding their behavior; much of the drama therefore lies in the conflict between these ideas and the realities confronted by the heroines. With Catherine, however, we see someone who is just beginning to learn about t

He stood pouting his great lips in some old Roman’s garden two thousand years ago. He saw the sandalled feet treading the alleys and the rose-crowned heads bending over the wine; he knew the old feasts and the old worship, the old Romans and the old gods. As I sit here he speaks to me, in his own dumb way, and describes it all!