From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure ...
The scientific creation story has majesty, power and beauty. and is infused with a powerful message capable of lifting our spirits in a way that its multitudinous supernatural counterparts are incapable of matching. It teaches us that we are the prod...
If you find the dividing line between fairy tales and reality, let me know. In my mind, the two run together, even though the intersections aren't always obvious. The girl sitting quietly in class or waiting for the bus or roaming the mall doesn't wa...
I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men." "Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you p...
Let me alone," said Mildred "Let alone!" He almost cried out with laughter. "Letting you alone is easy, but how can I leave alone? That's what's wrong. We need to be let alone. We need to be upset and stirred and bothered, once in a while, anyway. No...
Summer on the farm was glorious. Peter spent as much time out of doors as possible, and he had many playmates, since all the children were free from their spring and autumn duties of tending crops or going to school. Peter had become the leader of a ...
Jeremy and Karl and Elizabeth have known each other since the first day of kindergarten. Amy and Talis are a year younger...Now the five are inseparable; invincible. They imagine that life will always be like this--like a television show in eternal s...
The tragic fear and pity may be aroused by the Spectacle; but they may also be aroused by the very structure and incidents of the play—which is the better way and shows the better poet. The Plot in fact should be so framed that even without seeing ...
You're anxious to jump into the river, but you haven't checked to see if the water is deep enough." I don't bother pretending. "Sopeap, you speak in riddles. What are you saying?" "I'm saying that life at the dump has limitations, but it serves a pla...
What y'all ladies got to share? Hmmm, what you bitches got?" Aunt Georgia sighed and squinted at the boy. She said, "The Lord loves a cheerful giver, but I'm just not in the mood." The thug moved his hand from his crotch to his scalp, still scratchin...
One of the dangers of the spiritual story is that it disassociates humans from reality. Relieving world hunger, crime and suffering are replaced with fantasies of other worlds, dimensions, gods or forces that will magically take care of humanities pl...
Those deep set eyes that look like they could tell stories for days, and that wavy brown hair that feels soft between my fingers. I try to memorize the angles of his jaw and the lines of his lips, because I know. I know this may be the last time I ev...
The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, ...
As a young woman, I schooled my romantic sensibilities on the most impossible examples. "Romeo and Juliet" is one of my favorites. I once plotted out the length of time it took them to conjoin. Four days. Four days for one of the world's greatest sto...
Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"-...
Eva walked along the wall that held all of Michael's books. Shelves of science texts - physics, astronomy, a full set of Darwin's writings, new works in biomedical genetics - these were at the bottom, and books on philosophy and religion at the top. ...
I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that ...
Men recorded their experiences and called it history; men looked about the world and called their observations science; men wondered about the existence of God and the problem of evil and called their speculations theology; men did handiwork and call...
Lovecraft says he knows about tentacles but that motherfucker never bedded a girl from West Chester and survived She was a toothache that one and she tasted like crack the best thing about her was if I was ever hungry I could always make a meal out o...
I had thought about forgiveness more and more...I knew it wasn't a light that could be switched on in an instant-it grew day by day, week by week, month by month-but something was changing inside me now during the hours when I sat alone and tried to ...
In this way unwittingly the Widow-to-Be is assuring her husband’s death—his doom. Even as she believes she is behaving intelligently—“shrewdly” and “reasonably”—she is taking him to a teeming petri dish of lethal bacteria where within...
