I started looking on the splintery truck bed for a piece of board, a dirt clod -- anything I could throw and with better aim than I had thrown the beer bottle.

Human nature was not a piece of meat you could tell was bad by its smell.

Or the victim could chew hard on a piece of paper, meanwhile pressing his fingers tight in his ears.

These two, Heritage and Drexel, chose too not to produce the exactly matching design for every piece, but a collection of correlated designs, each of which could stand alone.

If I could put your body in an imaginary atomic press and squeeze you down, squeeze these holes out of you in the way we squeeze the holes out of a sponge, you would get smaller and smaller until finally when the last hole was gone, you would be smaller than the smallest speck of dust that you could see on this piece of paper.

They fasted or ate very little ; a statue of the god was made out of amaranth ( huautli ) seeds and honey, and at the end of the month, it was cut into small pieces so everybody could eat a little piece of the god.

It was seen by many in the West as a key piece in nuclear arms control, being an implicit recognition of the need to protect the nuclear balance by ensuring neither side could hope to reduce the effects of retaliation to acceptable levels.

Women in all social stations, even the working-class woman, could own a small piece of costume jewelry.

Guthrie discovered that a positively charged electroscope could be discharged by bringing a grounded piece of white-hot metal close to it ( but not actually touching it ).

I am not given to dogmatic judgments in the matter of literary creation, but if I had to make one I could say that Ecclesiastes is the greatest single piece of writing I have ever known, and the wisdom expressed in it the most lasting and profound.

Debuggers were some time away, but a CRT screen could be set to display the contents of a particular piece of memory.

Those who did write EDIF translators found they spent a huge amount of time and effort on generating sufficiently powerful, forgiving, artificially-intelligent readers, that could handle and piece together the poor-quality code produced by the extant EDIF 2 0 0 writers of the day.

At the time, some skeptics questioned whether a black man could have produced such an eloquent piece of literature.

Eventually Garnet let slip a crucial piece of information, that there was only one man who could testify that he had any knowledge of the plot.

Whale gathered as many of those as he could who had been involved in one production or another of the musical, including Helen Morgan, Paul Robeson, Charles Winninger, and, as Magnolia, Irene Dunne, who believed that Whale was the wrong director for the piece.

Getting on a boat, she offered to marry any man who could hit her with a piece of silver from the edge of the water.

" He praised Dick's accomplishment, saying " the whole creation resonates to the touch of the only present science-fiction writer who could possibly have done it " and characterizes the result as " a witty, sometimes lighthearted, and always fascinating piece of fiction.

Anthony and his wife made a deal — if he could sell a piece of writing within one year, she would continue to work to support him.

It would have been a fabulously expensive piece to commission, so that few men of the period could have afforded it.

Music printing had a major effect on how music spread for not only did a printed piece of music reach a larger audience than any manuscript ever could, it did it far cheaper as well.

Stravinsky called the ballet " the single piece of modern music he could listen to with pleasure ," while Ravel called it " a work of genius.

Loyd bet a friend that he could not pick a piece that didn't give mate in the main line, and when it was published in 1861 it was with the stipulation that white mates with " the least likely piece or pawn ".

About a dozen animals were held inside the stockade, as best Mike could make out in the moonlight.

I knew that three or four of them were almost always present in the hall, but what they were doing, and exactly where, I could not tell.

Atonement, if atonement were possible, could only be made at that sacred, sacrificial basin.

He could not grasp that Lord had withdrawn from the fight minutes ago, and that his leaden arms were flailing at nothing but the air.

Jury, judge and executioner were riding the range in the form of a single unknown figure that could materialize anywhere, at any time, to dispense an ancient brand of justice the men of the new West had believed long outdated.

By now Harmony could see that most of the adults in the train were winded and resting, or else siphoned off from the games by the challenging lure of the great cliff towering above them.

The way his red rubber lips were stretched across his pearly little teeth I thought he was only having a little joke, but, no, he wanted me to bend down from the roar of wind so he could roar something into my ear.

At once my ears were drowned by a flow of what I took to be Spanish, but -- the driver's white teeth flashing at me, the road wildly veering beyond his glistening hair, beyond his gesticulating bottle -- it could have been the purest Oxford English I was half hearing ; ;

They were married over the week-end, though he was easily sixty and she could not have been even thirty.

If it were not that I knew who it was I could have mistaken it for my Aunt so well did her clothes fit him.

As best as I could determine, we were some 700 miles west of New Guinea, in the Bismark Archipelago.

Then he would realize they were really things that only he himself could think.

The truck routes, the industrial areas with walls grimed with diesel smoke passed briefly through his mind -- back alleys were their access to a city and they could never stay.

The debate needed no additional controversy and soon I could ask each individually what he expected from life, what his hopes were and what his fears.

Capable of enduring friendships, they were also stout controversialists, who could write with a drop of vitriol on their pens.

What Lincoln could not concede was that the states rather than the people were sovereign in the Union.

When these had been pocketed, we could still spend a morning cracking open other pebbles for our delight in seeing how much prettier they were inside than their dull exteriors indicated.

We were forbidden to swing on the gates, lest they sag on their hinges in a poor-white-trash way, but we could stand on them, when they were latched, rest our chins on the top, and stare and stare, committing to memory, quite unintentionally, all the details that lay before our eyes.

it was mud in wet weather and dust, ankle-deep, in dry, and could be crossed only at the corner where there were stepping stones.

If we were creating a wholly new society, we could insist that our social, political, economic and philosophic institutions foster rather than hamper man ; ;

It was, of course, a little boy's fantasy of winning his mother to himself, and replacing the father who could not give her the things she wanted -- a classical oedipal fantasy if you like -- but if it were only this the story would be banal.

and bright though they all were, they could not possibly compete for her interest with Papa, whose mind -- although he never tried to dazzle or patronize lesser lights with it -- naturally eclipsed theirs and made them seem to her even younger than they were.