A philosophical discussion ensued about right and wrong, and good and bad. Also about things to be ashamed of and things to be feel guilty about. Could anything carried out between two consensual adults be wrong? And why should they be embarrassed by...
I had a dream about you. We got into an argument over the toilet seat. Down, up, down, up, down, up, we each thought we were right. Finally, being a natural diplomat, I suggested we compromise and leave the toilet seat halfway between down and up. Yo...
...most people in the ancient world, did not make a sharp distinction between myth and reality. The two were intimately tied together in their spiritual experience. That is to say, they were less interested in what , than in what it . It would have b...
Not everyone understands what a completely rational process this is, this maintenance of a motorcycle. They think it's some kind of "knack" or some kind of "affinity for machines" in operation. They are right, but the knack is almost purely a process...
Simon's band never actually produced any music. Mostly they sat around in Simon's living room, fighting about potential names and band logos. She sometimes wondered if any of them could actually play an instrument. 'What's on the table?' 'We're choos...
I am one of the Clave. It's in my blood and bones. So tell me, if you're so sure this wasn't my fault, why is it that the first thought in my mind when I saw Abbadon wasn't for my fellow warriors but for you?" His other hand came up; he was holding h...
I wanted to spend more time with her; she was constantly in my thoughts, and right now the only thing I wanted was to lean in and kiss her. Which was, of course, disastrous for the mission, but I couldn't help it. Somewhere between that day on the be...
The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. 'Anything,' he thinks, 'any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.' He ...
If you focus your eyes towards the horizon, everything and everyone walking in front of you becomes a blurry mass. That's what everyone else became. All of their dark wool suits began to mesh into one, and they began to rhythmically march in unison, ...
I brought you out here because I wanted to share a sunrise with you, and maybe even a sunset. I wanted to see how much I could kiss you between now and the time we dock tomorrow. And if I was really lucky, I was hoping I could lie with you until you ...
Every day we're told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest countr...
Wuthering Heights, however it may appear in retrospect, demands a reading of the utmost intensity, the feeling present in the writing seems to seek a matching response in the reading. If we turn from the story that Emily Brontë tells to the kind of ...
Recognising such dimensions implicit to the reading experience can distract from the immediacy of our response; it can substitute literary archaeology for novelistic reality. That is one pole. But the other extreme is equally limiting. By failing to ...
Baumauer sits at home in silence in the evenings planning how to impress his rigidly strict father who’s in his late seventies, but who still enforces the same dynamic between himself and his three, guilt-ridden sons as he did when they were childr...
Fights between individuals, as well as governments and nations, invariably result from misunderstandings in the broadest interpretation of this term. Misunderstandings are always caused by the inability of appreciating one another's point of view. Th...
We must tell stories the way God does, stories in which a sister must float her little brother on a river with nothing but a basket between him and the crocodiles. Stories in which a king is a coward, and a shepherd boy steps forward to face the gian...
She had always thought that if only people could communicate mind-to-mind, eliminating the ambiguities of language, then understanding would be perfect and there'd be no more needless conflicts. Instead she had discovered that rather than magnifying ...
The difference between the past and the present is that individual freedom and security no longer fall to be protected solely through the D vehicle of common-law maxims and presumptions which may be altered or repealed by statute, but are now protect...
The realistic style is easy to abuse: from haste, from lack of awareness, from inability to bridge the chasm that lies between what a writer would like to be able to say and what he actually knows how to say. It is easy to fake; brutality is not stre...
You're going to get a present from me so you'll always remember our agreement." She gave him a crooked smile and climbed on to the bed and knelt between his legs. Bjurman had no idea what she intended to do, but he felt a sudden terror. Then he saw t...
And Kate thought about a time, long ago, when she had witnessed an ongoing romance between two mental patients. As a teenager watching their unlikely relationship unfold in front of her, she had understood that people did whatever they needed to do t...
