I'd much rather have sat there and just been a fly on the wall, instead of having to smile at people. I'd rather have been a waitress. Just gone round and stared at people.

My mother sent me to psychiatrists since the age of four because she didn't think little boys should be sad. When my brother was born, I stared out the window for days. Can you imagine that?

One day I went up to my mom and I said, 'Mom, can I have permission to build a 2.3-million electron-volt atom smasher - a betatron - in the garage?' And my mom stared at me, and she said, 'Sure. Why not? And don't forget to take out the garbage.'

The bowlers I respected or feared or rated were not the ones who gave me lip or stared at me or abused me. More the ones who, at any stage of the game, when had they had the ball in hand, they were going to be at me, and they were going to have the skill and the fitness and the ability to be aggressive.

Just to go into a shop without getting stared at would be nice. I mean, I don't walk around like, 'Oh, I'm trying to be famous' - I try to lead as normal a life as possible - but sometimes it's annoying. It's fine; it's not a massive problem, but sometimes it's just a bit uncomfortable.

First time I looked at a Formula One car in person, I just stared at the cockpit, figuring I'd never get in there. The drivers wear the whole car like a tight-fitting suit.

My biggest hero, Gregory Peck, was my birthday present on April 14, 1973. I just sat and stared at him.

"At sea, the darker the night the closer you will get to your past. The music you decide to play is the radio dial of your history. Van Morrison's "Have I Told You Lately" played as I stared at the setting moon. This is a song that always transports me to a New Hampshire backroad of my youth. Her name was Katie. She was tall, blond, and wore the girl next door look like an angel. She was smart, funny, and kind. She infatuated me from the moment I met her at Wentworth Marina. She was the daughter of two well-to-do doctors from upstate New York. It was her plan to sail around the world, and she wanted me to join her. "Just to mate" she would always say with a wink.

"I went to the bathroom and put each hand forcefully down on opposite sides of the sink. I looked straight into the mirror before me and stared at the person I'd been ignoring for some time now. I didn't have to say much. I already knew all this person's demons. I shook my head in disapproval. The alcohol and hate were killing me. What they missed, the depression whittled at unrelentingly. My whole life I had been told that I didn't look like a fisherman. All the while the only thing I wished to be was a fisherman. I screamed at the mirror in pure rage.

We'd stared into the face of Death, and Death blinked first. You'd think that would make us feel brave and invincible. It didn't.

I stared at her. "But she drugged us.

The moon stared at me through sprinkled nighttime stardust and I alone smile.

I stared up at the sky and raised my middle finger, just in case God was watching. I don't like being spied on.

If faith never encounters doubt, if truth never struggles with error, if good never battles evil, how can faith know its own power? In my own pilgrimage, if I had to choose between a faith that has stared doubt in the eye and made it blink, or a naive faith that has never known the firing line of doubt, I will choose the former every time.

Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look.

"You can read minds, and you didn't tell me?" Link stared at me like he just found out I was the Silver Surfer. He rubbed his head nervously. "Hey, man, all that stuff about Lena? I was yankin' your chain." He looked away. "Are you doin' it now? You're doin' it, aren't you? Dude, get out of my head." He backed away from me and into the bookshelf.

Frank stared at her. "But you throw Ding Dongs at monsters.

In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

Ransom really looked at the other man for the first time, shook his head, stared again. "Holy hell, your eyes are like a fucking viper's.

I stared at him (Dionysus). "You're...you're married? But I thought you got in trouble for chasing a wood nymph-

Henry turned as if to dart out of the room, then swung around and stared at them, a look of confusion passing over his freckled face, as if he had only now had cause to wonder why Will, Tessa, and Jem might be crouching together in a mostly disused storage room. "What are you three doing in here, anyway?

Frank stared at him. "Unfair? You can breathe underwater and blow up glaciers and summon freaking hurricanes-and it's unfair that I can be an elephant?

"But-" Maia, still looking at Alec and Magnus, broke off and rasied her eyebrows. Simon turned to see what she was looking at - and stared.

Over the years I'd lodged him in the permanent past, my pluperfect lover, put him on ice, stuffed him with memories and mothballs like a hunted ornament confabulating with the ghost of all my evenings. I'd dust him off from time to time and then put him back on the mantelpiece. He no longer belonged to earth or to life. All I was likely to discover at this point wasn't just how distant were the paths we'd taken, it was the measure of loss that was going to strike me--a loss I didn't mind thinking about in abstract terms but which would hurt when stared at in the face, the way nostalgia hurts long after we've stopped thinking of things we lost and may never have cared for.