When I was younger, I would cling to life because life was at the top of the turning wheel. But like the song of my gypsy girl, the great wheel turns over and lands on a minor key. It is then that you come of age and life means nothing to you. To liv...
Mrs Ratlow was a widow, and she was head of English, but she still did all the cooking and cleaning for her two sons, and she never took holidays because she said -- and I will never forget it -- "When a woman alone is no longer of any interest to th...
Thank you father, thank you. I know you watched me from above and protected me. I promise I shall serve the Magnarian Confederation with all my body and soul. I shall dedicate myself fully to our confederation, the family that you so loved. And I lov...
I couldn't stop thinking about the body, what a hard fact it was. That philosopher who said we think, therefore we are, should have spent an hour in the maternity ward of Waite Memorial Hospital. He'd have had to change his whole philosophy. The mind...
Let's worry like mad. Shall we start on a worldwide basis and work down to ourselves, or start with ourselves and spread?" "I'm going to do me-and-Peter and that dead man." "All right. I'm just going to do a wee one about Bunny and then I'll join you...
Sometimes the greatest thing we can ask ourselves is “Why not me?” Anyone who has ever accomplished anything worth while has either verbalized or internalized this question. The beauty of the answer is that it completely depends on us. We are all...
Beyond the shadows of our doubt lies an ocean of extraordinary possibilities; things that could have been or could be; if we had the faith to see them through. Our doubts betray and deflect us from our true selves and deprive us of our chances to lov...
If we internalize every disappointing setback with contempt and self-loathing, a life of solitary confinement and discontentment awaits us. It’s a verdict indicted by a prosecution, deliberated by a jury and condemned by a judge…all three being y...
Greenspan advised the American people to buy - he repeated the old mantra: 'spending is patriotic'. He also managed to convince them that if they did not have the money, that shouldn't stop them. They would 'pay later'. To a certain extent he was cor...
What she did not know, and would never have believed, was that though her soul seemed to have been grown over with an impenetrable layer of mould, some delicate blades of grass, young and tender, were already pushing their way upwards, destined to ta...
So Yoda sounds like our best bet as an energy source. But with world electricity consumption pushing 2 terawatts, it would take a hundred million Yodas to meet our demands. All things considered, switching to Yoda power probably isn't worth the troub...
I'd been feeling like this for a while, the continual looking back, the stuckness of it all. I blamed it on the coming New Year, only four and a half months away, when the clocks would read zero and we would start again, could start again, but I knew...
If man is not made in the image of God, nothing then stands in the way of inhumanity. There is no good reason why mankind should be perceived as special. Human life is cheapened. We can see this in many of the major issues being debated in our societ...
You always fed strays and bent down to talk to the dogs you met on the street, looking straight into their eyes as if they were old friends. (Maybe they are, you said. From another life.) You liked to go to the pound and look at them. You tried to se...
Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflected the landscape. And yet ... and yet ... Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they wou...
Sometimes there is no choice but to walk into your own house. Far away, you think, and you do not want to see. You come home and you say do not tell me. You say, I have hunted the elk all over the snowfields of the Selway, and I do not want to know w...
Dorian said, 'If you do the right thing twice, it will cost you your life. ' Blint said, 'There are things more valuable than life.' The count said, 'You can't pay for all you've done. But you aren't beyond redemption. There's always a way out. And i...
«Linkeree does what he likes. He likes to be alone and think his own thoughts. No one is hurt by it.» Sara said, «Jason said that we are one people. Linkeree is saying he does not want to be part of us, and if he is not part of us then we are all ...
Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: 'My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, "The Cookiepants Hypotenuse."' Or else they get unbearably cutesy: '...
There was a lot of pain in that kiss. There was so much hurt and so much fear in it. I felt tears rolling down the both of our faces. But, in that kiss, there was even more want. We both wanted to smother out that pain, to not have so many horrible t...
[In reference to cases of testicular feminization]: “The incredible lesson about our sexual biology is that all men at one point in their fetal development have the capacity to be women. Moreover the body is programmed to develop as a female unless...