To be so bent on Marriage - to pursue a man merely for the sake of situation - is a sort of thing that shocks me; I cannot understand it. Poverty is a great Evil, but to a woman of Education and feeling it ought not, it cannot be the greatest. I woul...
The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, monomedicine. The belief that there is only one right way to live, only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affa...
And I feel that I am a man. And I feel that a man is a very important thing - maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and...
I was hell-bent on being an effective humanitarian in Cambodia and Somalia. But a naïve fog is finally lifting. Revealed is a train wreck of illusions, the depravity of someone else's war, the futility of a competence stillborn there. To understand ...
The baronet, in his old age, had been cast up by his vices on the shores of melancholy; heavy-eyed, grey-haired, bent, he seemed to pass through life as in a dream. ("The Undying Thing")
Who knows? Life may just be a Positive Conspiracy bent on putting us in the right place at the right time every living, breathing moment of the day. It just takes a certain kind of perspective to see this. Realizing this can put our "analyzer" on hol...
There was one thing no one considered, however: Australia was populated by Australians. While the rest of us were trying to adapt to a world that suddenly seemed bent on eradicating the human race, the Australians had been dealing with a hostile envi...
For what it’s worth”—he rose from his seat, moved around the table and bent over her, whispering in her ear as he pressed a kiss to her cheek— “I like you better in a pair of worn jeans, and I think you deserve someone who appreciates what ...
…and they limp and halt, they’re all wrinkled, drawn, they squint to the side, can’t look you in the eyes, and always bent on duty, trudging after Ruin, maddening, blinding Ruin. But Ruin is strong and swift—She outstrips them all by far, ste...
It takes a lot of moola to fool around with national magazines, regardless of their politics. It takes even more if the paper is hell bent on shoving a hot poker up the rear end of the Establishment, as that editorial posture is not conducive to a ma...
She walked around the edge of the table to position her next shot. As she pulled her cue back she was confident that she would only need one more shot after this. But as she started her forward motion, Ben leaned over. "Look at this picture," he said...
This is what history is: all those centuries of bodies, moving over these canals, twisting and blooming into life in these houses, these streets; all that flesh hungering, coming together, separating, continuing, accumulating, relinquishing, aging an...
He handed the dust pan and brush over. I knew they wouldn’t be much use in cleaning the floor. I also knew the real reason he had given them to me: so he could look furtively at me, as I bent over. That idea turned me on. I welcomed it, and decided...
The primary purposes of the political pamphlets of the early 1700s were neither to enlighten nor educate the masses, but to incite partisan conversation and spread commensurate ideas . . . Facts were not permitted to fetter the views they espoused, a...
We decided to become development psychologists and study children because there aren't any Martians. These brilliant beings with the little bodies and big heads are the closest we can get to a truly alien intelligence (even if we may occasionally sus...
We decided to become developmental psychologists and study children because there aren't any Martians. These brilliant beings with the little bodies and big heads are the closest we can get to a truly alien intelligence (even if we may occasionally s...
The city defeated him. It refused to be bent into shape; it stayed a willful, sprawling, sinful place. It even told him as much. When he walked through the gutted wreck of old Saint Paul's, he tripped and fell over a piece of rubble -- a tombstone. W...
Tuning must come first. Each recital begins with a careful tightening of the pegs on the cross-bar, twisting them in their socket of red threads as each string is plucked and tested. He uses his thumb for this, softer and subtler than the plectrum, h...
The United States of America was a pirate nation for the first one hundred years of its existence, ripping off the patents and trademarks of the imperial European powers it had liberated itself from by blood. By keeping their GDP at home, the U.S. re...
She came very close, and looking into my eyes, she said, “My Jenny,” and then she bent her head and kissed me—here, on the left-hand corner of my mouth. And nobody knows better than I that I couldn’t have felt anything, because Tamsin was a g...
It was very bad if the council had resorted to recruiting men. By tradition men were our last line of defence, their physical strength bent towards the single and most important task of protecting our homes and children. This meant the council had de...
