Early Quotes

Intern will resonate not only with doctors, but with anyone who has struggled with the grand question 'What should I do with my life?' In a voice of profound honesty and intelligence, Sandeep Jauhar gives us an insider's look at the medical profession and also a dramatic account of the psychological challenges of early adulthood. ~ Akhil Sharma

Everybody says: the Kremlin, the Kremlin. They all go on about it, but I've never seen it. The number of times (thousands) I've been drunk or hung over, traipsing round Moscow, north-south, east-west, end to end, straight through or any old way - and I've never once seen the Kremlin.

For instance, yesterday - yesterday I didn't see it again, though I was buzzing round that area the whole evening and it's not as if I was particularly drunk. I mean, as soon as I came out onto Savyelov Station, I had a glass of Zubrovka for starters, since I know from experience that as an early-morning tipple, nobody's so far dreamed up anything better.

Anyway, a glass of Zubrovka. Then after that - on Kalyaev Street - another glass, only not Zubrovka this time, but coriander vodka. A friend of mine used to say coriander had a dehumanizing effect on a person, i.e, it refreshes your parts but it weakens your spirit. For some reason or other it had the opposite effect on me, i.e., my spirit was refreshed, while my parts all went to hell. But I do agree it's dehumanizing, so that's why I topped it up with two glasses of Zhiguli beer, plus some egg-nog straight from the bottle, in the middle of Kalyaev Street.

Of course, you're saying: come on, Venya, get on with it - what did you have next? And I couldn't say for sure. I remember - I remember quite distinctly in fact - I had two glasses of Hunter's vodka, on Chekhov Street. But I couldn't have made it across th ~ Venedikt Erofeev

My biggest regret? Well, I got my boobs done in my early 20's and if I had known it would or could possibly have impacted production of milk, I would never have had them done. I love being a mom. ~ Tori Spelling

Now in Utah if you get the death sentence, they have the firing squad. In Russia, they call that early retirement. ~ David Letterman

To me, the capacity to earn money has never been a measurement of success. It is my belief that people must develop a philosophy early in life which permits them to have as much pleasure, enjoyment and satisfaction now as is possible without injuring themselves or others. Money can help to do this, but it is not and must not become the sole aim of a person's existence. We all know what happened to King Midas. ~ Rudy Vallee

Early in my career, I decided I never wanted to get out of shape. ~ Cal Ripken, Jr.

I've been mentally preparing myself to come out all over again, but I've been doing that for a while now. That was one of the things I realized early. If you're queer, your life has the potential to become one long coming-out moment. If I ever want to be called the right pronouns, I'll have to correct people and put myself out there first and who knows what could happen. ~ Mason Deaver

My train was late, slowed by the usual Sunday engineering work. I got home in the early evening. I remember that I had a bloody good long shit. ~ Julian Barnes

Very early morning. The sun was not yet risen, and the whole of Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist. The big bush-covered hills at the back were smothered. You could not see where they ended and the paddocks and bungalows began. ~ Katherine Mansfield

That's how it goes these days, huh? Moving forward at the sounds of horns on highways, at the cue of traffic signals, turnstiles, tollbooths, ushered and rushed to the next stop on the itinerary, and there are days on the commuter train in the winter when it's got dark early and you can't see out because of the reflection and you might put down your paper or put aside your book and really look at yourself, because amid the noise and the smoke and the strangers and what's become of your life: there you are. ~ Wilton Barnhardt

It's bad to get up early, stand at your typewriter and work, then find it's nothing and take a bottle to bed. ~ Ray Bradbury

Apart from the pleasure of looking at her and listening to her
of enjoying in her what others less discriminatingly but as liberally appreciated
he had the sense, between himself and her, of a kind of free-masonry of precocious tolerance and irony. They had both, in early youth, taken the measure of the world they happened to live in: they knew just what it was worth to them and for what reasons, and the community of these reasons lent to their intimacy its last exquisite touch. ~ Edith Wharton

If you must know, my parents came from pretty hardscrabble backgrounds in the southern Midwest. I certainly didn't grow up poor, but I did spend my 20s and early 30s juggling temp jobs and choking on massive student-loan debt. ~ Meghan Daum

Far from the richest rapper, but my biggest personal achievement thus far in my life has been retiring my mom early from her job at the Post Office. It's a tiny payback for the sacrifices she made that allowed me to chase a far-fetched dream of becoming a successful artist. I'm forever grateful, ~ J. Cole

I was standing amid floor-to-ceiling shelves of books in wonder and awe when my view of stories suddenly and forever changed. There were enormous piles of books lying in corners. Books covered the walls. Books even lined the staircases as you went up from one floor to the next. It was as if this used bookstore was not just a place for selling used books; it was like the infrastructure itself was made up of books. There were books to hold more books, stories built out of stories.

I was standing in Daedalus Books in Charlottesville, Virginia, and I had recently read Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a Book. I was alive with the desire to read. But at that particular moment, my glee turned to horror. For whatever reason, the truth of the numbers suddenly hit me. The year before, I had read about thirty books. For me, that was a new record. But then I started counting. I was in my early twenties, and with any luck I'd live at least fifty more years. At that rate, I'd have about 1,500 books in me, give or take.

There were more books than that on the single wall I was staring at.

That's when I had a realization of my mortality. My desire outpaced reality. I simply didn't have the life to read what I wanted to read.

Suddenly my choices in that bookstore became a profound act of deciding. The Latin root of the word decide - cise or cide - is to "cut off' or "kill." The idea is that to choose anything means to kill off other options you m ~ Justin Whitmel Earley

Expect to be woken up bright and early, then."
"Oh, goody. Cock-a-doodle-doo. ~ Jasinda Wilder

One of the things I would immediately do [as Commander in Chief ], in addition to defeating them here at home, is bring back the warrior class - Petraeus, McChrystal, Mattis, Keane, Flynn. Every single one of these generals I know. Every one was retired early because they told President [Barack] Obama things that he didn't want to hear. ~ Carly Fiorina

When it first emerged, Twitter was widely derided as a frivolous distraction that was mostly good for telling your friends what you had for breakfast. Now it is being used to organize and share news about the Iranian political protests, to provide customer support for large corporations, to share interesting news items, and a thousand other applications that did not occur to the founders when they dreamed up the service in 2006. This is not just a case of cultural exaptation: people finding a new use for a tool designed to do something else. In Twitter's case, the users have been redesigning the tool itself. The convention of replying to another user with the @ symbol was spontaneously invented by the Twitter user base. Early Twitter users ported over a convention from the IRC messaging platform and began grouping a topic or event by the "hash-tag" as in "#30Rock" or "inauguration." The ability to search a live stream of tweets - which is likely to prove crucial to Twitter's ultimate business model, thanks to its advertising potential - was developed by another start-up altogether. Thanks to these innovations, following a live feed of tweets about an event - political debates or Lost episodes - has become a central part of the Twitter experience. But for the first year of Twitter's existence, that mode of interaction would have been technically impossible using Twitter. It's like inventing a toaster oven and then looking around a year later and discovering that all your custo ~ Steven Johnson

Ree is his. Is his, is devoted to him, is aggravatingly tender and possessively passionate and wrapped up in him in a thousand ways, loves him in a way that is very useful. It seems a law of nature, at this point. Even if the events of this startling evening have served to give him pause, a little. But Ree is still his. He's fairly sure. Such complex knots can't be untied so quickly, can they?

Still, it's not the only thing disturbing him, about the Dam's account of early events. She laughs when she sees his face, his sidewise look at her description, and there's definitely a mean note to it. "Oh, it was darling," she says, and he gets the feeling of a caged animal stuck behind bars, while a cruel child pokes at it. "You were enchanted by his wolf, would follow it anywhere, welcome or not, though mostly he tolerated it. But you couldn't manage his name – and a nickname hadn't stuck at that point – so instead you imitated the sound he made. Rather insultingly, too, if not intentionally – Ruff. Or Woof, or whatever it was that you intended to say, except that it actually came out as Wuff. Or Wuffy, depending, and at varying pitches and volume as you ran after him, falling down and rolling about half the time."

Penn is transfixed. It's outrageous, it's an outrage. It can't possibly be true. It was nothing like that. ~ Alex Ankarr

We [with Nimai Larson] listened to hardly any music except Hare Krishna music growing up and the occasional Garth Brooks that our babysitter would play for us. From a very early age, we looked at music as mantra based, very cyclical, and having no linear time. ~ Taraka Larson

Europe was not born in the early Middle Ages. No common identity in 1000 linked Spain to Russia, Ireland to the Byzantine empire (in what is now the Balkans, Greece and Turkey), except the very weak sense of community that linked Christian polities together. There was no common European culture, and certainly not any Europe-wide economy. There was no sign whatsoever that Europe would, in a still rather distant future, develop economically and militarily, so as to be able to dominate the world. Anyone in 1000 looking for future industrialization would have put bets on the economy of Egypt, not of the Rhineland and Low Countries, and that of Lancashire would have seemed like a joke. In politico-military terms, the far south-east and south-west of Europe, Byzantium and al-Andalus (Muslim Spain), provided the dominant states of the Continent, whereas in western Europe the Carolingian experiment (see below, Chapters 16 and 17) had ended with the break-up of Francia (modern France, Belgium and western Germany), the hegemonic polity for the previous four hundred years. The most coherent western state in 1000, southern England, was tiny. In fact, weak political systems dominated most of the Continent at the end of our period, and the active and aggressive political systems of later on in the Middle Ages were hardly visible.

National identities, too, were not widely prominent in 1000, even if one rejects the association between nationalism and modernity made in much contemp ~ Chris Wickham

English people don't have very good diction. In France you have to pronounce very particularly and clearly, and learning French at an early age helped me enormously. ~ Vivien Leigh

Runners exalt the marathon as a public test of private will, when months or years of solitary training, early mornings, lost weekends, rain and pain mature into triumph or surrender. That's one reason the race-day crowds matter, the friends who come to cheer and stomp and flap their signs and push the runners on. ~ Nancy Gibbs

Just think of what Woodrow Wilson stood for: he stood for world government. He wanted an early United Nations, League of Nations. But it was the conservatives, Republicans, that stood up against him. ~ Ron Paul

Do not weep for those who have found Death's embrace early, for they weep for us that linger on in this mortal world of pain. ~ Stewart Stafford

It is not even accurate to say that Christianity eventually broke away from Judaism. It is more accurate to say that, out of that matrix of biblical Judaism and that maelstrom of late Second-Temple Judaism, two great traditions eventually emerged: early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism. Each claimed exclusive continuity with the past, but in truth each was as great a leap and as valid a development from that common ancestry as was the other. They are not child and parent; they are two children of the same mother. So, of course, were Cain and Abel. ~ John Dominic Crossan

I wanted to be a writer from my early teenage years, but I never told anyone. Writers, in my opinion, were god-like creatures, and to say I was striving to be a writer would be incredibly arrogant. ~ Tim Cahill

In the middle Ages, Berber was written in the Maghribi style of the Arabic script, in what is to all appearances a standardized orthography. The earliest known examples of the medieval Berber spelling date from the middle of the 10th century A.D., while the youngest examples date from the 14th century.

Although there is some variation in the representation of a number of consonants, the orthography is remarkably consistent. In this respect it is quite unlike the early orthographies of the European vernaculars, where the same word is often written in different ways even within one line of text. This consistency implies that the Berber orthography was consciously designed, and that it was formally taught to berberophones.

"MEDIEVAL BERBER ORTHOGRAPHY" - MELANGES OFFERTS A KARL-G. PRASSE (pp. 357-377). ~ Nico Van Den Boogert

So much of our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory: we can never recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother's bosom or rode on our father's back in childhood. Doubtless that joy is wrought up into our nature, as the sunlight of long-past mornings is wrought up in the soft mellowness of the apricot, but it is gone for ever from our imagination, and we can only BELIEVE in the joy of childhood. ~ George Eliot

In the early stages the sexual needs will have the upper hand, in later stages the compulsive moralistic inhibition. At times of political upheavals of the total social organization, the conflict between sexuality and compulsive morality becomes most acute. This will impress some people as the "collapse of morality," other people as "sexual revolution." At any rate, the idea of the "decline of culture" is the perception of the breakthrough of natural sexuality. The only reason why it is experienced subjectively as "decline" is the fact that it threatens the compulsive moralistic way of living. What happens objectively is only the downfall of the sexual dictatorship which maintains the compulsive moralistic forces in the individuals in the interest of authoritarian marriage and family. ~ Wilhelm Reich

If you're going to equalize the academic playing field, you've got to get the kids in early childhood programs. ~ Paul Vallas

There has been only one Christian. They caught and curcified him-early. ~ Mark Twain

I tried to, from my very early years, I've been an inveterate movie goer and still am and I, I love the medium. So what I, what I draw and what I'm still doing, is part of that particular orientation. ~ Jack Kirby

I skipped kindergarten because I was reading at a pretty high level. That's a weird and cocky thing to say, but I was real sharp, and I knew that early on. ~ Hannibal Buress

The cause of these great extinctions, the most extensive in the seventy-million-year record for mammals, is a mystery. The two prevailing guesses, climatic environmental pressure or the destruction caused by human immigration in these regions, are at a stalemate. Nearly all regions of extinction were briefly inhabited by early humans, which is why some feel they played roles. I was not there at the time, so I can only speculate, but surely a global catastrophe of some sort triggered the cataclysm. ~ Stephen J. O'Brien

Before this grief, mountains must bend down
And rivers stop,
But prison locks are strong,
And behind them are the labor-camp bunks
And the deadly tedium.
For others the fresh breeze is blowing,
For others the extravagant sun sets -
For us everything is the same, we know nothing,
We hear only the keys and their hateful grinding.
Only the soldiers' stiff steps.
We get up as for early Mass in the city,
The savaged city, and coming
We meet ourselves, the dead, the unbreathing.
The sun is low, the Neva misty,
It is only in the distance that hope is singing.
The sentence . . . and at once tears,
Now everything has been taken,
The rest of life, torn from her heart,
Knocked backwards by a hoodlum
And yet she walks . . . stumbles . . . alone . . .
Where are they now, unwilling friends
Of years in Hell?
What visions do they see in Siberian snow-storms?
What hallucinations in the circle of the moon?
I send them this goodbye and wish them well. ~ Anna Akhmatova

May is a very early time in the year and the weather is usually bad. You cannot run a fast mile race if there is a strong wind, because it makes your running uneven. ~ Roger Bannister

From early childhood I had always dreamed of becoming an explorer. Somehow I had acquired the impression that an explorer was someone who lived in the jungle with natives and lots of wild animals, and I couldn't imagine anything better than that! Unlike other little boys, most of whom changed their minds about what they want to be several times as they grew older, I never wavered from this ambition. ~ John Goddard

Teachers say their schools of education did not adequately prepare them for the classroom. They would have welcomed more mentoring and feedback in their early years. ~ Arne Duncan

I discovered early in life that living frightened me when I was sober. ~ Eugene O'Neill

Unlike my brother, I had no respect for authority. Very early on, Uncle Georg had told me the truth about teachers: that they were moral cowards who took out on their pupils all the frustrations they could not take out on their wives. When I was very young Uncle Georg impressed upon me that among the educated classes teachers were the basest and most dangerous people, on a par with judges, who were the lowest form of human life. Teachers and judges, he said, are the meanest slaves of the state--remember that. He was right, as I have discovered not just hundreds but thousands of times. No teacher and no judge can be trusted as far as you can throw him. Without scruple or compunction they daily destroy many of the existences that are thrown upon their mercy, being motivated by base caprice and a desire to avenge themselves for their miserable, twisted lives--and they are actually paid for doing so. The supposed objectivity of teachers and judges is a piece of shabby mendacity, Uncle Georg said--and he was right. Talking to a teacher we soon discover that he is a destructive individual with whom no one and nothing is safe, and the same is true when we talk to a judge. ~ Thomas Bernhard

For many Westerners, "it's natural" seems to mean "it's good." This view is wrong and comes from shopping in supermarkets and living in landscaped environments. Plants evolved toxins to deter animals, fungi, and bacteria from eating them. The list of "natural" foods that need processing to detoxify them goes on and on. Early potatoes were toxic, and the Andean peoples ate clay to neutralize the toxin. Even beans can be toxic without processing. In California, many hunter-gatherer populations relied on acorns, which, similar to manioc, require a labor intensive, multiday leaching process. Many small-scale societies have similarly exploited hardy, tropical plants called cycads for food. But cycads contain a nerve toxin. If not properly processed, they can cause neurological symptoms, paralysis, and death. Numerous societies, including hunter-gatherers, have culturally evolved an immense range of detoxification techniques for cycads. By contrast with our species, other animals have far superior abilities to detoxify plants. Humans, however, lost these genetic adaptations and evolved a dependence on cultural know-how, just to eat. ~ Joseph Henrich

[N]early every creationist debater will mention the second law of thermodynamics and argue that complex systems like the earth and life cannot evolve, because the second law seems to say that everything in nature is running down and losing energy, not getting more complex. But that's NOT what the second law says; every creationist has heard this but refuses to acknowledge it. The second law only applies to closed systems, like a sealed jar of heated gases that gradually cools down and loses energy. But the earth is not a closed system
it constantly gets new energy from the sun, and this (through photosynthesis) is what powers life and makes it possible for life to become more complex and evolve. It seems odd that the creationists continue to misuse the second law of thermodynamics when they have been corrected over and over again, but the reason is simple: it sounds impressive to their audience with limited science education, and if a snow job works, you stay with it. ~ Donald R. Prothero

The first language that I learned was Italian in Italy in the early and middle-'60s and I had to do that to keep up with the young men who were courting my wife. ~ Clive James

I didn't get any college credit for playing in Vampire Weekend, you know. So it was definitely an early hurdle to get over with C.T. winning and us losing to C.T.. But I think sorta since then, in the four years since, we've managed to pave everything over. ~ Chris Baio

People aren't going to go bankrupt anymore if they have a serious illness, which was a serious issue here in the country before the Affordable Care Act. And, in fact, the expense of expanding health care for those who need the subsidy is picked up by the federal government for most of the early years. ~ Deval Patrick

There's no doubt about it, show business lures the people who didn't get enough love, attention, or approval early in life and have grown up to become bottomless, gaping vessels of terrifying, abject need. Please laugh. ~ Dennis Miller

Jimmy Carter began his planning in the early summer of 1976, Ronald Reagan a year prior. The Clinton Administration, elected in 1992, lingered in naming its team, and as a result, took almost a year to staff its ranks. ~ Richard V. Allen

While they read these stories, moreover - and this is a comforting thought for those who believe that the best way for anyone to become a lover of real literature is to be exposed to it early and often - boys and girls are not only gratifying their love for a
stirring tale, they are making the acquaintance of the great story-tellers of the past, taking them into their lives as companions. This early contact gives children an experience which will keep their horizon in after life from being entirely circumscribed by the mediocre and ephemeral. If a boy has sailed the wine dark Aegean, or climbed a height whence he could watch Roland's last heroic stand in the Pass of Roncevaux, some gleam remains, and there is far less likelihood that his adult reading will be entirely commonplace. ~ Anne Thaxter Eaton

Through an experience that simultaneously involved my sensibility and intelligence, I realized early on that the imaginative life, however morbid it might seem, is the one that suits temperaments like mine. The fictions of my imagination (as it later developed) may weary me, but they don't hurt or humiliate. Impossible lovers can't cheat on us, or smile at us falsely, or be calculating in their caresses. They never forsake us, and they don't die or disappear.
The book of Disquiet ~ Fernando Pessoa

My father was a doctor,' she says, 'a very kind man. He died in the early '70s, relatively young.' She taps the cigarette packet on the table. 'Of lung cancer.'
'Oh.'
'But the thing about that is,' she says as she exhales, 'it doesn't take very long at all. ~ Anna Funder

Sometimes, when I went to the spring to wash early in the morning," he murmured, "there'd be tiny fairies flitting around above the water, not much bigger than the butterflies you have here, and blue as violet petals. They liked to fly into my hair. Sometimes they spat in my face. They weren't very friendly, but they shone like glowworms by night. I sometimes caught one and put it in a jar. If I let it out at night before going to sleep I had wonderful dreams."
"Capricorn said there were trolls and giants, too," said Meggie quietly.
Dustfinger gave her a thoughtful look. "Yes, there were," he said. "But Capricorn wasn't particularly fond of them. He'd have liked to do away with them all. He had them hunted. He hunted anything that could run."
"It must be a dangerous world." Meggie was trying to imagine it all: the giants, the trolls, and the fairies. Mo had once given her a book about fairies.
Dustfinger shrugged. "Yes, it's dangerous, so what? This world's dangerous, too, isn't it? ~ Cornelia Funke

Addie Moore had a grandson named Jamie who was just turning six. In the early summer the trouble between his parents got worse. There were bad arguments in the kitchen and bedroom, accusations and recriminations, her tears and his shouts. They finally separated on a trial basis and she went off to California to stay with a friend, leaving Jamie with his father. He called Addie and told her what happened, that his wife had quit her job as a hairdresser and had gone out to the West Coast. ~ Kent Haruf

Peacock bass like to hide at ambush points, away from the strong canal currents. If you fish early and know those peacock hangouts, you will have little or no trouble catching peacocks on lures and live bait. ~ Mark Hall

The early months of marriage often are times of critical tumult,
whether that of a shrimp pool or of deeper water,
which afterwards subside into cheerful peace. ~ George Eliot

There is a lesson we learn early and harmlessly, or late and traumatically - that there are things we can break that our parents can't fix. ~ Robert Breault

Mythos is the sum total of the early historic and prehistoric myths which preceded the logos. The mythos includes not only the Greek myths but the Old Testament, the Vedic Hymns and the early legends of all cultures which have contributed to our present world understanding. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

It is often said that Islam is an egalitarian religion. There is much truth in this assertion. If we compare Islam at the time of its advent with the societies that surrounded it - the stratified feudalism of Iran and the caste system of India to the east, the privileged aristocracies of both Byzantine and Latin Europe to the west - the Islamic dispensation does indeed bring a message of equality. Not only does Islam not endorse such systems of social differentiation; it explicitly and resolutely rejects them. The actions and utterances of the Prophet, the honored precedents of the early rulers of Islam as preserved by tradition, are overwhelmingly against privilege by descent, by birth, by status, by wealth, or even by race, and insist that rank and honor are determined only by piety and merit in Islam. ~ Bernard Lewis

in 3000 b.c....in spain, france, the british isles and old europe, the lives of people centered on nature and motherhood. they honored mother nature, mother earth and mother creator. women were revered as the givers of life. as creators, they were thought to be connected to diety. statues of the goddesses of these early people were of full-breasted women with bodies clearly depicting the ballooning abdomen of women about to give birth. these primal people regarded birthing as the highest manifestation of nature. when a woman gave birth, everyone gathered around her in the temple for the "celebration of life." birthing was a religious rite, and not at all the painful ordeal it came to be years later. ~ Marie F. Mongan

There is nothing else for it, I shall have to solve my own problems. I always get the feeling that when I solve them for myself I shall have also solved them for a thousand other women. For that very reason, I must come to grips with myself.

All this devouring of books from early youth has been nothing but laziness on my part. I allow others to formulate what I ought to be formulating myself. I keep seeking outside confirmation of what is hidden deep inside me, when I know that I can only reach clarity by using my own words. I really must abandon all that laziness, and particularly my inhibitions and insecurity, if I am ever to find myself, and through myself, find others. I must have clarity, and I must learn to accept myself. Everything feels so heavy inside me, and I want so much to feel light. For years I have bottled everything up, it all goes into some great reservoir, but it will have to come out again, or I shall know that I have lived in vain, that I have taken from mankind and given nothing back. I sometimes feel I am a parasite and that depresses me and makes me wonder if I lead any kind of useful life.

Perhaps my purpose in life is to come to grips with myself, properly to grips with myself, with everything that bothers and tortures me and clamors for inner solution and formulation. For these problems are not just mine alone. And if at the end of a long life I am able to give some form to the chaos inside me, I may well have fulfilled my ow ~ Etty Hillesum

On Mondays and Fridays in early May, nearly 18,000 children-the equivalent of all the elementary students in suburban Glencoe, Wilmette, Glenview, Kenilworth, Winnetka, Deerfield, Highland Park and Evanston-are assigned to classes with no teacher. ~ Jonathan Kozol

Waking to the sound of the bells for third-gold, I found myself staring up at a pair of interested brown eyes.
"She's awake!" my watcher called over her shoulder. Then she turned back to me and grinned. She had a pointed face, curly dark hair escaping from two short braids, and a merry voice as she said, "Splat!" She clapped her hands lightly. "We were fair guffered when you toppled right off Drith, facedown in the chickenyard mud. Lucky it was so early, for no one was about but us."
I winced.
She grinned again. "You're either the worst horse thief in the entire kingdom, or else you're that missing countess. Which is it?"
"Ara." The voice of quiet reproach came from the doorway.
I lifted my eyes without moving my head, saw a matron of pleasant demeanor and comfortable build come into the room bearing a tray.
Ara jumped up. She seemed a couple years younger than I. "Let me!"
"Only if you promise not to pester her with questions," the mother replied. "She's still much too ill."
Ara shrugged, looking unrepentant. "But I'm dying to know."
The mother set the tray down on a side table and smiled down at me. She had the same brown eyes as her daughter, but hers were harder to read. "Can you sit up yet?"
"I can try," I said hoarsely.
"Just high enough so's we can put these pillows behind you." Ara spoke over her shoulder as she dashed across the room.
My head ached just to watch her, and I closed my eyes again.
"Ara."Sherwood Smith