Indirect examples

But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few months of one’s life, is it so awful to travel through time with no greater ambition than to find the next lovely meal? Or to learn how to speak a language for no higher purpose than that it pleases your ear to hear it? Or to nap in a garden, in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right next to your favorite foundation? And then to do it again the next day?

Of course, no one can live like this forever.

 -Elizabeth Gilbert

“it was hard to shake the mental picture snapped by her suggestion: here is a boy sitting on a bed, his mouth smeared with chocolate. He’s a human being, but also he’s a pig, surrounded by trash and gorging himself so that others may be denied. Were this the only image in the world you’d be forced to give it your full attention, but fortunately there were others.”

-David Sedaris

“Since that day I’ve wondered if my mother really meant to kill me. I needed to know, yet I couldn’t ask. Not until now. Now she remembers me differently. Now she recalls that I was a good girl, so good she never had to spank me, not once that she can recall.”

- Amy Tan

Direct Examples

“My time of innocence was quickly running out.” - “Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun” - Geoffrey Canada  

“I wish I was anything but eleven” - “Eleven” --Sandra Cisneros

“And this I believe: That my father’s lie has vanished, and that fat, lazy, stupid girl has an intelligence, spirit, and beauty all her own.” - My Father Told Me I Was Fat  - Cherie