The bookshop felt damp and chilly, but it was still and unsupervised bookshop, and Anna felt a frisson of excitement as she scanned the shelves with greedy eyes. Libraries weren't quite the same, she'd found; something about the prosaic smell of othe...
When you arrive in the afterlife, you find that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley sits on a throne. She is cared for and protected by a covey of angels. After some questioning, you find out that God's favorite book is Shelley's Frankenstein. He sits up at ...
You may be some fearsome creature, but I'm her daddy. You hurt her, there aren't enough stone walls to keep me away from you and prevent me from mounting your head on a pike. You think you're a mean sonovabitch? Next to a father who's listening to hi...
I don't know. This college would probably have the same problem the last one did." I frowned. "What's that?" "Homework." "Adrian," growled his father. "It's okay," said Adrian breezily. He rested his arm casually on the table. "I don't really need a ...
I somewhat understand now why He favored all of you so much. And why one of us had been jealous, led the quarter of the others, and had been casted down. There’s a little of Him in all of you,” Sigrid uttered after a while, and then she rested he...
Once she exclaimed, "But I always thought that sorceresses were evil!" "What do you mean 'evil'?" Lynet has never considered the question. "You know," she said, after a moment, "unfriendly to people." "People!" repeated Morgana derisively. "As if hum...
After having been standing by the gate of the garden for a long time, Siddhartha realised that his desire was foolish, which had made him go up to this place, that he could not help his son, that he was not allowed to cling him. Deeply, he felt the l...
He couldn't tell if she was checking him out with sexual interest or sizing him up. Did she know who he was? Truly was... Or maybe she just wanted to get to know him. Hell if he knew. It'd been too long since he'd paid attention to a woman and he hat...
At her gesture Michael cursed and caught her hand, falling suddenly atop her. She stared up at him wondering what bedchamber faux pas she’d committed. He groaned at her look. “I’ll let ye pet and play all ye want—after. Now I need”—he pus...
After twenty years of unbelief, doubt had become a habit. Doubting was easy, routine; it was my natural, instinctive reaction. Somewhere along the line I had stopped considering any other options. Doubt was my default. So choosing the blessing, the m...
Rosy ferried the drinks back to the table, slid the Guinness his way. “You said you have a show. Is it a comedy?” “No, but you will laugh, I hope, after hearing my qualifications.” His eyes glittered. “I do magic, with a twist. The twist is...
Among this people there is no leisure class. We often forget that in the United States over half the youth and adults are not in the world earning incomes, but are making homes, learning of the world, or resting after the heat of the strife. But here...
Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by c...
One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts--just mere thoughts--are as powerful as electric batteries--as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison. To let a sad thought or a bad one get into y...
You will be interested to hear, Hilary, that it [the drug] had a most remarkable effect — even on Selena after a very modest quantity. She cast off all conventional restraints and devoted herself without shame to the pleasure of the moment." I aske...
What's a doctor, after all? A legitimized voyeur, a stranger whom we permit to poke fingers and even hands into places where we would not permit most people to insert so much as a finger-tip, who gazes on what we take most trouble to hide; a sitter-a...
, a collateral form of (the so-called "holy war"), taken [by Sufis] to mean "earnest striving after the mystical life." The term is based on the Koranic text, "And they that strive earnestly in Our cause, them We surely guide upon Our paths." A Tradi...
For it is good to cleave to God, and to put our hopes in the Lord, so that, when we have exchanged this poor life for the kingdom of heaven, we may cry aloud: 'Whom have I in heaven but thee? There is none upon earth that I desire beside thee.' Assur...
To attempt to describe how music pervades and flavors a life feels a little like an invasion of privacy, even if the privacy is my own. Listening to music,...is finally the most inward of acts--so inward that even language, even the language of thoug...
But then fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favo...
Think of the most discouraging thing that you are currently carrying or the biggest project you can’t seem to tackle. Forget about how it happened, forget about how you got there, just look at the clock, and before that number changes, do one littl...
