Word: godly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...insulin reaction. Before the assembled family--George Roche IV, Roche and his new wife--Lissa allegedly announced that she had been sleeping with the elder Roche for most of her 21-year marriage to his son. Hillsdale officials say Roche denied the affair to the board, "invoking God as my witness." Then two weeks ago, he abruptly retired, walking away from a job that made him the fifth-highest-paid college president in the country, with salary and benefits that Forbes magazine estimated at $524,000 last year. "Together we have built a wonderful dream," Roche said in his resignation...
Society's horrified reaction has plenty of precedent as well. In Leviticus, God tells Moses: "Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard. Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you." And John Bulwer's Anthropometamorphosis, Man Transformed or, the Artificial Changeling, Historically Presented, a Puritan diatribe published in 1653, railed against disfigurement of the body in pursuit of "ridiculous beauty," "filthy fineness" and "loathesome loveliness...
...grayish postwar years, it is, to borrow Greene's favorite word, a routinely "seedy" coupling. Until the afternoon when, taking a break from their lovemaking, Maurice steps out of the room and a buzz bomb strikes. She thinks he's dead, drops to her knees and prays: if God will spare him, she will give him up. Whereupon Maurice returns to the bedroom, stunned but intact...
Sarah makes good on her promise. And Greene makes good on the theme that dominated his best work: "the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God." Maurice, of course, is outraged by Sarah's disappearance--and sets a private detective on her. He's looking for an earthly explanation--a rival lover--not an unearthly one, for Sarah's defection. For her part, Sarah remains unsure what has happened to her. Was her prayer answered? Or was Maurice merely knocked out by the explosion...
...giving the counselors what they wanted, just as in another arena he had got movie stars and directors what they wanted. The only time I really believed him was when he said, over and over again, in the middle of eating a bowl of cereal or rewinding a video, "God, I'd love some coke...