“The Vietnam War took place between November 1, 1955 and April 30, 1975. This war cost 2 million Vietnamese civilian lives, 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers, 250,000-250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers, 58,220 American fighters, and 173 billion dollars.”
“It is unlikely that anybody would like to live in a world in which there are no birds chirping and no fish swimming. We do not stop to notice the lizards, trees, and snails that are around us every day, but once we lose them, it will be glaringly obvious. This bleak picture is not one from a dystopian novel; it is our very realistic future.”
“Everyone at my school thinks that I’m a nobody / They just don’t know the real me / I’m Peru Emma Maxwell / I’m known as the “quiet girl” or “nobody” / None of that is true”
“Millions of faces / Millions of stomping feet / Millions of pink hats / Millions of minds, / Determined to set things right.”
“A woman with a stroller, the baby / Kicking its feet and the aging leaves / Crunched under wheels. / Red;”
“I remember sliding down the bunny hill on November 12, 2013. I remember my brother’s hands around my waist. I remember them holding me tight and not letting go. I remember the heat from the hands comforting me that made me feel safe. I remember hearing my life and giggles in slow motion.”
“It had rained all night, yet, there was no rainbow. Well, there was no sun either… but still. I was saddened by the outcome of the storm. It was just sky and clouds and emptiness. I got off the bus, feeling empty as well, like the lack of rainbows had affected me personally.”
“A lot of times I don’t feel comfortable without a coat on. The thought of people staring at my arms and my body is terrifying to me, so whenever I’m going out anywhere I always take a coat. The only bad thing about this is that it only works in the winter. In the spring and summer is when I really feel uncomfortable.”
“Jason walked right up to me in front of 70 Pine, our designated meet up spot. As always, he was late, and I was early. The sun was going to set at almost eight o’clock, and it was only six, so we were good to make the sunset shots.”
“On Mondays, some of the students — mainly boys, unsurprisingly — act exhausted, just to annoy the teachers. This usually ends in parents being kindly invited to discuss their child’s behavior in class, or just the typical, ‘Go to the principal’s office, right now!’ But today, everything seems… different.”
“Unique. That was my name. At least that’s what I thought it was, until my mom told me it was Shellsea, but I didn’t like that name because it was not different and it was similar to someone else’s.”
“I love the smell of the fresh air and the feel of wind gracefully blowing my hair, whipping it away from my face. This is one of the times I feel free. My stress thousands of miles away. Just sitting and looking out across the landscape to where the brilliant sun is slowly disappearing.”
“The door handle slowly turned. I noticed a small fleck of white paint crinkle and fall to the floor, leaving an abyss of gray on the door. My dad had said we would get it redone, but we never did.”
“on dusty racks / my whole life sits / in crumpled balls of / scribbled lines / the stories that / i couldn’t tell”
“I remember the kids’ vibrant and youthful voices filling the void in my mind with playfulness. I remember the dark skies shielding me from the truths of what lay beyond them, while we brushed past the greenery in our chosen form of transportation.”
“As the general took his strides around his base, he smiled. He saw the lieutenants preparing for battle, the cadets screaming at one another to get ready, and the captains going over the strategies one last time.”
“Cyrus woke up that morning without the familiar scent of pine. Even in his sleep soaked mind, Cyrus immediately recognized the change. Something was wrong. He opened his eyes, searching the little room for any noticeable differences.”
“We’d hear the wild grass / Rustle like a blanket / On a cold summer night / As we watch the stars.”
“HER EYES ARE SO GREEN THEY BURN! like the curling pages of a magazine, chemical coating dyeing the flames. The Emerald City ablaze, the serpent’s tongue, the forest floor of the Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve sin and sweat. And when you look at me with them, ooh girl, but I feel it all the way to my toes.”
“It is a human’s greatest humanity to see beauty in imperfection. The way that her mouth curves slightly to the left when she smiles. The way that a wave never breaks the same in any place. It’s that happiness that is unique and different to each sadness that follows it.”
“It was June 18, 1999, when Bob lost his first finger. It was an otherwise normal day at Gleg’s Edible Food. The vegetable guy had gone on a “mission to mars” (this was a scam), so Bobby “Ten Fingers” was to do the job. He was instructed to cut the frungis, by Gleg himself.”
“The floor beneath my feet was vibrating as our small, dirty car rolled down the old, dirt road that led toward the city. It was a gloomy morning. Small droplets of rain pattered the window lightly. There was no sunlight because the fog was too thick to let light reach the dirt road. My mother was in the front seat, the place where my father used to sit, squinting to see the road ahead of us.”
“So there I was, sitting at the poolside, roped up and bleeding. I was shaking with a feverish violence that seemed to come from a scorching hot place, deep in my chest. Right then, I knew what I was going to do. The little voice of reason that lives in the back of my mind was desperately wondering where Grace was.”
“Oh hello there, human… You shouldn’t have picked up this prison. That’s what this is, isn’t it. The more you look at this — thing, the more people die.”
“The stars were punch-outs in the blackness above her, sometimes it hurt to think about space. She could think herself out of the earth, through the blue ring of atmosphere and even further beyond, looking down. If she willed it, it was possible for her to imagine herself growing more distant, shrinking, fading into… what?”
“An effortlessly beautiful, captivating dream that keeps you afloat on a cloudless sky in midwinter / Skin as white as the velvety snow atop faintly visible mountains that kiss the sun on the horizon / It’s unmistakably yet naturally different from me”
“The ship docked on the sandy shores. / Waves lapping at its barnacled belly / the anchor digging deep into the earth. / Hundreds swarmed the grounds, / scouring for fresh water.”
“I am not made of gloriously pristine lavenders / Or resplendent, snowy daisies / Not even cherry blossoms with petals as softs as the summer rain”
“I remember the day they discovered the time capsule. They first described it as a white, bowl-shaped contraption containing a golden disk. We didn’t know what it was and where it came from. Scientists studied the disk and eventually determined how to operate it. And then the sounds started playing: unfamiliar rhythms and tunes.”
“His hair is flawless; his eyes are perfect, / His music: my very inspiration, / His dreamy face is another aspect, / Singing to me in each situation, / But lighting up a smile on the faces, / Of countless devoted, adoring fan, / Does not equal knowing his embraces,”
“the type of tiredness that settles behind your eyes and doesn’t leave. / the type of quiet that twists your gut and unsettles your mind. / the type of moments that make you wish for an alternate reality.”
“and they told stories, too, of gasoline sickness, / the bloodshot eyes and ragged breaths,
the sleepless nights and sleepwalking days, / how they were homesick/homesick/seasick/homesick,”
“The doorbell jingled as a woman and her daughter entered the cafe. They did not look at all alike. The daughter was short and chubby and seemed to waddle instead of walk; the mother was tall and lanky, each angle from chin to elbow sharpened to a point.”
“The cold, dry air blew through the forest. The trees swayed from side to side, occasionally dropping twigs or leaves on the hastily built campsite. The concoction of the sounds from the day quietly dissolved into the thin, night air. The only noise in the whole forest was the sound of the fire crackling and the wrinkling of the piece of paper I clutched tightly in my hand.”
“The establishment of a border that clearly demarcates where your hand ends and your phone begins may seem easy at first. As technology worms it’s way further into our lives, however, the hand and the phone fuse, and the weight of humanity becomes more and more reliant on the crutch sweetly proffered by our mechanical aides.”
“Once upon a time, there was a lion, (also known as the king for the citizens, the husband for the wife, and Dad for the cubs). There was a lioness, (also known as queen for the citizens and Mom for the cubs and wife for the king) and two lion cubs.”
“A dark-haired Girl with pale, lifeless eyes, no older than seventeen, but with a countenance hardened beyond her years arrived here around six months ago with no expectations and no purpose.”
“Elsu woke up, like every morning. Hungry. Living in the winter pit houses during the harshest winter that he had ever experienced.”
“It’s a humid day, reminiscent of so many others in Bangladesh, as Aarashi hops on the truck that will take him to the coal mine where he has toiled in obscurity most of his adult life. He enters the claustrophobic tunnel, like he has nearly every morning for twenty-six years, and is instantly swallowed by darkness.”
“‘If any one of you ladies stole my gods-damn peppermints, I’m going to give your spellbooks to the gods-damn witch hunters!’ The tired voice of Tallulah Hemmings — the strangest young witch in all of everywhere, as her biased mentor put it — rang out across the deck of what looked to be an oddly shaped pirate ship, tumbling its way across the waves with an eccentric grace.”
“Reach up, up, to the cotton candy skies. To the heavens of pink, of white, and of gray, to the spun-sugar taste of a spring’s lovely day. The fire’s smoke twists into skeins of dark air, but the blue sky’s cobwebs knot into pale hair. Sunlight and moonlight and light of all hues, quiet in violet and in all types of blues.”
“Since the beginning of recorded history, humankind has maintained a strong fascination with its own demise. From its eschatological roots to the nuclear age and beyond, apocalyptic thought has permeated mass culture. However, the thematics of apocalyptic thought and therefore of its representation in culture have shifted, although certain consistencies have survived.”
“Sigmund Freud once theorized that all instincts can be categorized as life instincts (Eros) or death instincts (Thanatos). Life instincts, most commonly referred to as sexual instincts, are the need for humans to survive, feel pleasure, and reproduce. Death instincts create a thrill-seeking energy that is expressed as self-destructive behavior.”
“Two years ago, I sat in social studies class on a rainy Friday morning counting the hours until I could go home. As I typed out a text to an equally bored friend across the room, my male teacher, responding to an inquiry about his weekend plans, made a casual remark about his husband.”
“What would you do to win? How far would you go to get what you want? This is a question I often ask myself, mostly because of the sport of debate, which I have been taking in school for a year so far.”
“‘We’re going to die here. We’re going to die,’ Carmen Algeria thought as she dodged gunshots raining down on her while witnessing people drop left and right.”
“Thirty seconds. That is all the time it takes for thirteen underage girls to be sold into a marriage, turned into a breeder of sons and unwanted daughters, and imprisoned in a lifetime of anguish and abuse. This is the fate that awaits many women in third-world countries.”
“In 1913, in Atlanta, Georgia, Leo Frank, the Jewish superintendent of the National Pencil Factory, was tried and convicted for the murder of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old female worker in his factory. Local newspapers documented the court proceedings in great detail, framing Frank as a corrupt factory owner and a pervert.”
“Toll scans replace tollbooth operators, ATM and pay sharing apps replace bank tellers, drones replace pilots and delivery workers, and robots replace factory workers at manufacturing assembly plants.”
“The night is alive, and similar to a human, it may be allied with. It has a peaceful side and a dark one. In Shakespeare’s tragedies, the night takes on the darker role, but in his comedies, such as The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it takes on the lighter, more peaceful one.”
“We usually think of our hands as fairly physical things — almost distant things; we don’t regularly consider what they are doing or how we control them. Not so much for Macbeth. In William Shakespeare’s classic Macbeth, power-hungry Macbeth murders many for the Scottish throne, which witches tell him he will gain.”
“Many critics — specifically literary critic Patricia Cadwell — now praise Bradstreet for her efforts for being “the founder of American literature” and her role in exposing the evils of patriarchal tradition (Cadwell 138). In truth, various works of American literature emphasize the female figure’s thirst for equality through the continuation of restrictive, outmoded ideologies pertaining to gender rights.”
“This practice of casting white actors as non-white characters, known as whitewashing, has become all too common in Hollywood. Whitewashing, however, is not a new phenomenon; it has endured for centuries.”
“As the 1790s neared in the newly formed United States, it became evident that the Articles of Confederation — the very document that established an independent nation — had to be rewritten.”
“Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, an early feminist, and William Godwin, a progressive and an anarchist who raised her with values which advocated social justice and reform. One might thus expect Shelley’s writing to be alive with strong female personalities and feminist ideas.”
“John came from a long line of fishermen. His family made its living off of selling fish. Until, one fateful day, John’s father was killed by a crab he had fished. John’s father was fishing and got a bite on his hook. He began to pull. It wasn’t easy to catch. He was then pulled into the water by the two ounce crab.”
“So, a quick recap for all of you who have zoned out for the last thirty minutes, Dinah’s story goes like this. Once upon a time, Dinah, the only named daughter of Ya’akov and Leah, went walking in search of other girls in the land of Chamor. Shechem, Chamor’s son, “vayikach Dina” — or “takes” her. What happens after she has been taken, is debated.”
“One nation, torn apart / by cartographic line / and the thunder of fifteen million footfalls. / Bodies pile and neighbors leave / for a chance to live. / That history, I am its future.”