At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes--an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This i...
I’ll never turn her away, Clyde. She’s my mate. I’ll protect her till my dying breath. I’ll even swallow my pride and ask a favor as momentous as the one I just asked of a man who has done nothing but try to drive a wedge between her and myse...
Oatmeal Face, Jawless, and the other revenants dragged me out of the van by the zip tie between my hands. The sharp plastic bit painfully into my wrists. "All right, all right, I'm coming," I said. "Keep your faces on." There was no reaction from any...
Facing death calmly is praiseworthy only if one faces it alone. Death together is no longer death, even for unbelievers. The source of sorrows lies not in leaving life, but in leaving that which gives it meaning. When love is our whole life, what dif...
The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: me...
You can’t atone for taking one life by saving another. What good does that do the dead?” “The dead,” she said. “And we have plenty of dead between us, but the way we act, you’d think they were corpses hanging on to our ankles, rather than...
Smiling is the way the soul says hello. Obviously a frown means goodbye. Is there a word halfway between hello and goodbye? Because that’s what my soul is saying right now.
You are a real hermaphrodite, Mafouka,’ I said. 'That is what our age is supposed to have produced because the tension between the masculine and the feminine has broken down, people are mostly half of one and half of the other. But I have never see...
Valkyrie, I will get answers from you one way or another. Either through this painful exercise in futility, as you believe, or through a civilized conversation." "You call this civilized?" She strained against her cuffs, leaning in to whisper, "Psst,...
It has been my experience that around half of those offering a product or service, in every line of business, are quite utterly useless. Some of them actually bordering on criminal. The remainder are split between two camps, the acceptable and the ex...
If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering it...
That is the earth, he thought. Not a globe thousands of kilometers around, but a forest with a shining lake, a house hidden at the crest of a hill, high in the trees, a grassy slope leading upwards from the water, fish leaping and birds strafing to t...
Dialogue between two characters, each of them different forms of karate, might be a bit choppy.
How many fears came between us? Earthquakes, diseases, wars where hell rained smoldering pus from skies made of winged death. Horror tore this world asunder. While inside the bleeding smoke and beyond the shredded weeping flesh we memorized tales of ...
I think now that this is the great division between people. There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, in-built, expectation of happiness, and there are those who feel that happiness is not to ...
We had more fun waiting in line together at the Department of Motor Vehicles than most couples have on their honeymoons. We gave each other same nickname, so there would be no separation between us. We made goals, vows, promises and dinner together. ...
If I love freedom above all else, then any commitment becomes a metaphor, a symbol. This touches on the difference between the forest fleer and the partisan:this distinction is not qualitative but essential in nature. The anarch is closer to Being. T...
Bruno withdrew from the field of history more resolutely than Vigo; that is why I prefer the former’s retrospect but the latter’s prospect. As an anarch, I am determined to go along with nothing, ultimately take nothing seriously – at least not...
A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody...
All around them were the bodies of dead Chinese soldiers. They lined the verges of the roads and floated in the canals, jammed together around the pillars of the bridges. In the trenches between the burial mounds hundreds of dead soldiers sat side by...
Can I just say that I don't care if two planes or trains or whatever take off from different locations at different times and travel at different speeds. I am not traffic control, so why the hell would I care what time they'd pass each other?
