"A dish is only as good as the recipe you follow and a relationship only as good as the strictures agreed upon," Denise told her husband, but he knew that wasn't strictly true. 

It sounded so amusing in his head before his tongue managed to mangle the bon mot so bad that it was more like a wilted word salad drowning in a thick dressing of malapropisms and bathos. 

 Every slight, every misstep, every missed opportunity came rushing back at 3 a.m. 

 In the heart of winter the dead vegetation retained a sacred beauty that rivaled summer's bounty. 

 He was known for never finishing anything he

 Her nights veered between nightmares and the crushing realities that swirled around in her head and prevented her from returning to said nightmares. 

 The wrapping is now torn and discarded like the anticipation of the moment that has so quickly ended.

 All the gifts had tiny tears in the wrapping from where we'd slyly attempted to figure out what they were—shaking them revealed next to nothing—in the excruciating days leading up to Christmas.

There was no sound sadder or more triumphant (sometimes simultaneously) than the cello, Richard believed. 

Waylaid by a drunken elf who mistook him for a famous actor, Ward lost his chance at the last of the season's hottest gifts—a dancing Jesus who sang Bible verses in the style of Elvis—since he was unwilling to fight a scrawny old woman with fire in her eyes and a vocabulary to match. 

Reading this sentence is an experience you can have over and over and, if your memory is good enough, you don't have to come back here to do it.

Lonny couldn't follow the commandment to love thine enemy because he had none. 

 The winter landscape, a study of grays and browns, reminded Laura of her own life. 

 "Always look on the bright side of life," she said, raising the gun to his head. 

A new study finds studies often misinterpret the data of other studies that find studies to be accurate. 

We are but a meme of a meme of a meme, filtered, rearranged, and reshared ad Infinitum. 

 The dawn light—pink, red, orange, and purple—heralded a joyful day. 

Don't let them win by killing your empathy, the only thing that truly sets us apart. 

 It took four hours to make dinner and four minutes to devour it, which had Will wondering if it was worth all the work. 

No matter what Shelly did she never seemed to get her holiday cards out before New Year's. 

A foul-mouthed crow was his only companion. 

She had been wrecked and rejected but knew love could still recycle that old heart of hers. 

Steve felt fine about stuffing his face with donuts after successfully completing his annual physical with no major health issues.   

One more sentence to get out, she thought, and I can finally stop, but Agatha knew there was always one more sentence waiting to be birthed. 

 He looked in the mirror and no longer saw the youth who witnessed the war and worse yet, the eyes, the eyes had lost that animating spark, sputtered out by the unshakable memories that had followed him for so many years. 

Once it's out there it can't be erased.

Ghosts of Christmases past lived in the old holiday records they would pull out and play every year. 

 Like her cats, Cathryn always sought the sunniest spots. 

 "You are not you anymore," she said, "but I'm still not sure who you've become." 

This sentence is my way of working out unclear, sometimes unknowable feelings, a groping towards clarity that usually never comes. 

Ralph would read the obits and mourn not just for the loss of a life but also for the lost chance to hear the stories of these people he'd never met and now never would.