It's easy to look at people and make quick judgements about them, their present and their pasts, but you'd be amazed at the pain and tears a single smile hides. What a person shows to the world is only oneone tiny facet of the iceberg hidden from sit...
Human beings are like the screwed-up children of alcoholic parents in that way, picking up the pieces afterward and trying to make up reasons why. You could argue that’s what makes us interesting, and maybe it is to some alien race studying us from...
Success-minded people make a decision to achieve a goal and never have to make that decision again. They will be faced with a choice or some new circumstances to deal with, but the decision to achieve the goal is not in question. They have only to ma...
Having faith requires leaps of faith, cerebral acceptance of miracles - immaculate conceptions and divine interventions. And then there are the codes of conduct. The Bible, the Koran, Buddhist scripture ... they all carry similar requirements - and s...
The stag’s enormous head turned slightly—toward the wagon, toward the small window. The Lord of the North. So the people of Terrasen will always know how to find their way home, she’d once told Ansel as they lay under a blanket of stars and tra...
There have been bleak nights along my way, many of my own making, but life is all the brighter for them now. To the human eye, without the darkness there are no stars.
I'm a staunch monogamist. In practice, if not in theory. I can't help it. Do I acknowledge the oppressive, regressive nature of sexual exclusivity? Yes. Do I want that exclusivity very badly for myself? Also yes. There's probably some sort of way in ...
It was frankly sort of confusing, the way everyone stared at our bodies exactly as they tried to erase the ideas of our bodies from our minds. We were supposed to get over ourselves but no one was supposed to get over us. The female body was our wors...
One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The m...
A young man is the perfect soldier. He has great potential for aggression and a limited critical capacity—or none at all—with which to analyze it and judge how to channel it. Throughout history societies have found ways of using this store of agg...
Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless objec...
Whatever. I know that when a monster is chasing you. You take your high-heeled shoes off. I’ve learned that … And you never, ever dangle your legs over the edge of the bed at night … And clowns, well, you get rid of them right away; they are ju...
Her Majesty's government is engaging not merely in Orwellian Newspeak but in self-defeating Orwellian Newspeak. The broader message it sends is that ours is a weak culture so unconfident and insecure that if you bomb us and kill us our first urge is ...
He had never thought the question over clearly, but vaguely imagined that his wife had long suspected him of being unfaithful to her and was looking the other way. It even seemed to him that she, a worn-out, aged, no longer beautiful woman, not remar...
I have a rule." "Elaborate." The statue is still warm from the previous visitors. "I ask myself, if the worst happened—if I did get knocked up-would I be embarrassed to tell my child who his father was? If the answer is anywhere even remotely close...
The present moment is the substance with which the future is made. Therefore, the best way to take care of the future is to take care of the present moment. What else can you do?
I wish I hadn't cried so much!" said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out. "I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears! That will be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything is queer today.
We wind our way up the spiral staircase and then down the long hallway that leads to his room. I feel almost like I’m watching the scene unfold from outside my body. My fingers are interlocked with his as he pulls me toward a moment that’s going ...
Over the years, one comes to measure a place, too, not just for the beauty it may give, the balminess of its breezes, the insouciance and relaxation it encourages, the sublime pleasures it offers, but for what it teaches. The way in which it alters o...
Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these op...
I flutter my eyes ladylike. "I know the green fairy is absinthe, but what's the white angel?" "Cocaine. Wilde, by the way frequents this café. He claims he once saw an angel fluttering over the square. I image what he saw flying was one of the stone...
