Fish gathered to look at us - a school of baracudas, some curious marines. SCRAM! I told them. They swam off, but I could tell they went reluctantly. I swear I understood their intencions. They were about to star rumors flighing around the sea about ...
How often have I watched, and longed to imitate when I should be free to live as I chose, a rower who had shipped his oars and lay flat on his back in the bottom of the boat, letting it drift with the current, seeing nothing but the sky gliding slowl...
Alma is in a painting phase, and the people she paints are all the color of mold, look like they've just been dredged from the bottom of a lake. Her last painting was of you, slouching against the front door: only your frowning I-had-a-lousy-Third-Wo...
We cannot leave, but that does not mean we will stay—stay in the same place in the same system that profits from recycling us at the bottom. We will disrupt it. Build our own space that will swallow bits and pieces of theirs. We were waiting for pe...
High towers, and metaphysically-great men resembling them, round both of which there is commonly much wind, are not for me. My place is the fruitful bathos, the bottom-land, of experience; and the word transcendental, does not signify something passi...
...the very greatest satire, I came to think -- the kind that lives forever -- ultimately grew out of a debunking attitude toward the self. To see the world mock-heroically was necessarily to engage in a sort of preliminary self-burlesque. You couldn...
As it is with spiritual discoveries and affections given at first conversion, so it is in all subsequent illuminations and affections of that kind; they are all transforming. There is a like divine power and energy in them as in the first discoveries...
Her world fragmented into dozens of sharp, cutting shards, shedding the salty blood and saltier tears that ringed the bitter cocktail of her despair. She was caterpillar and butterfly, both, caught in a cocoon of raw nerves and open sores; she was in...
He had no secrets left. No defenses. He had nothing, except that same vast, dark, empty, infinite ache that had resided in him for as long as he could remember. An endless flight of stairs, leading down and down into the cold, dark pit of his soul. N...
We have an internal check and balance system. By design we are so filled with possibility, opportunity, with greatness that when we live small, within the bottom of our capability, we innately know we should be living greater than that, and it create...
The trouble is, writing the damn thing is like unscrewing your skull and pouring the contents of your brain into an empty tank. The tank has a shape, more or less - has more or less defined edges, a bottom and sides. But what it mostly has is volume:...
Too many of the women lack critical assignments that will give 'star' visibility in their companies, even though they are considered high potential," she said. "Such assignments enable a woman to prove herself by showcasing her skills, tenacity, lead...
The letter had been crumpled up and tossed onto the grate. It had burned all around the edges, so the names at the top and bottom had gone up in smoke. But there was enough of the bold black scrawl to reveal that it had indeed been a love letter. And...
Beneath my eyes opens -- a book; I see to the bottom; the heart -- I see to the depths. I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love; love makes knots; love bru...
Portability also explains why many old chests and trunks had domed lids- to throw off water during travel. The great drawback of trunks, of course, is that everything has to be lifted at to get things at the bottom. It took a remarkably long time- ti...
Sit, Phantom!" Ivy cooed. "On your bottom!" "Oh, for goodness' sake!" Gabriel put down his book and pointed a longer finger at Phantom. "Sit," he commanded in a deep voice. Phantom looked sheepish and sank straight to the floor. Ivy scowled in frustr...
I memorized all of “John Carter” and “Tarzan,” and sat on my grandparents’ front lawn repeating the stories to anyone who would sit and listen. I would go out to that lawn on summer nights and reach up to the red light of Mars and say, “T...
So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and to...
All of us somehow felt that the next battleground was going to be culture. We all felt somehow that our culture had been stolen from us – by commercial forces, by advertising agencies, by TV broadcasters. It felt like we were no longer singing our ...
While I do not believe in imperative goals or ends, I do believe in a returning endgame. When you reach one end, it should be for conception. When you reach the next end, it should be for immortality. One should reach the state of existing and non-ex...
Those who are at the top would celebrate for their victory that later others would inevitably interpret as boast. Those who are at the middle are very optimistic and open-minded that they would just smile and act like nothing could bother their pure ...
