I never had what it takes to make a first-rate anything.' 'That's wrong,' she declared. 'Everyone must have one thing that they can excel at. It's just a matter of drawing it out, isn't it?' But school doesn't know how to draw it out. It crushes the ...
They dig holes from time to time,' the Colonel explains. 'It is probably for them what chess is for me. It has no special meaning, does not transport them anywhere. All of us dig at our own pure holes. We have nothing to achieve by our activities, no...
I had a dream about you. I was a shoe salesman and you had no feet. I needed to make a sale or I’d be fired, and you needed reliable transportation. I suggested you buy shoes from me and for me, and in return I’d give you a piggyback ride. In the...
Unlike me, he realized that Dustfinger would do anything in return for such a promise. All he wants is to go back to his own world. He doesn't even stop to ask if his story there has a happy ending!" "Well, that's no different from real life," remark...
If the spirit of their intercourse were still the same after their coming together as it had been when they were living apart,' Aristotle writes, their association can't really be considered a polis, or political community. 'A polis is not an associa...
During his hajj, Malcolm [Malcolm X] fell into a new Islam with the same blind faith that he had given to Elijah. Since he lived just a year after his hajj, Mecca became the neatly presented and cinema-friendly conclusion to his lifelong thread of tr...
Les gens riches à Paris demeurent ensemble, leurs quartiers, en bloc, forment une tranche de gâteau urbain dont la pointe vient toucher au Louvre, cependant que le rebord rebondi s'arrête aux arbres entre le Pont d'Auteuil et la Porte des Ternes. ...
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy offers this definition of the word "Infinite". Infinite: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, "wow, that's big", time...
The major problem— of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-kn...
For instance, in one corner of the Eastern Galactic Arm lies the large forest planet Oglaroon, the entire "intelligent" population of which lives permanently in one fairly small and crowded nut tree. In which tree they are born, live, fall in love, c...
She wanted to know what it was like to be completely possessed by this man. Instead of scaring her, the thought sent the most erotic thrill racing through her. If she was stupid enough to sleep with him, she knew that things between them would end ba...
We are not quite novels. The analogy he is looking for is almost there. We are not quite short stories. At this point, his life is seeming closest to that. In the end, we are collected works. He has read enough to know that there are no collections w...
You’re like a god from a Greek myth, Saiman. You have no empathy. You have no concept of the world beyond your ego. Wanting something gives you an automatic right to obtain it by whatever means necessary with no regard to the damage it may do. I wo...
Ends Meet 1 Could be time is practice, balance, the action executed in the mind before and after. Where does mind end? 2 We mark a break with what has come before, come through the door, down the hatch. Not a break exactly. 3 Our life was rehearsal, ...
I saw the first light, fore-running the sun, gather in a cup of the eastern cloud, gather and grow and brim, till at last it spilled like milk over the golden lip, to smear the dark face of heaven from end to end. From east to north, and back to sout...
New Rule: Stop calling bagpipes a musical instrument. They're actually a Scottish Breathalyzer test. You blow into one end, and if the sound that comes out the other end doesn't make you want to kill yourself--you're not drunk enough.
I think one is naturally impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is beginning writing and that it is a natural thing because when one is emerging from adolescence, which is really when one first begins writing one fee...
Life is about means not ends. There is no utopia to be gained, there is no end-state that is static and eternal, once accomplished. This was one of the great lies of communism. Likewise, capitalism offers the great deception that thanks to its machin...
Summer, dropping so easily a delicious everything upon your skin and lips. Like a never-ending kiss—taunting, deep, and luscious. The sun. The heat. The thousand echoes of a timelessness before time, when every day seems longer than the next and no...
Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the differing intuitions we have when we are faced with an individual rather than with a mass of people, or with people close to us rather than with those far...
The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get "a good job," but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were worki...
