There was a small wooden gazebo built out over the water; Isabelle was sitting in it, staring out across the lake. She looked like a princess in a fairy tale, waiting at the top of her tower for someone to ride up and rescue her. Not that traditional...
It is not the task of a writer to 'tell all,' or even to decide what to leave in, but to decide what to leave out. Whatever remains, that meager sum of this profane division, that's the bastard chimera we call a 'story.' I am not building, but cuttin...
We human beings build houses because we're alive but we write books because we're mortal. We live in groups because we're sociable but we read because we know we're alone. Reading offers a kind of companionship that takes no one's place but that no o...
Science fiction, as a genre is fundamentally about ideas. It's about asking an impossible question, "What if...?" and building a story out of the answer. Romance on the other hand, is fundamentally about relationships. The hypothetical romance transp...
If you want to know what we are, look at the men reading books, searching in the dark pages of history for the lost word, the key to the mystery of the living peace. We are factory hands, field hands, mill hands, searching, building and molding struc...
May in Varanasi. 25° and wet. It's like the 6th circle of the inferno here, Edith - where they flail the arses off the howling heretics and the men who fuck marine life etc. NATO's stomping on the Balkans while India and Pakistan threaten one anothe...
Seth Brundle: I farm bits and pieces out to the guys who are much more brilliant than I am. I say, "build me a laser", this. "Design me a molecular analyzer", that. They do, and I just stick 'em together. But, none of them know what the project reall...
Boss Tweed: That's the building of our country right there, Mr. Cutting. Americans aborning. Bill: I don't see no Americans. I see trespassers, Irish harps. Do a job for a nickel what a nigger does for a dime and a white man used to get a quarter for...
[Elwood bumps into an old friend he hasn't seen for some time] Elwood P. Dowd: You've been away. Mr. Miggles: For 90 days. Been doin' a job for the state. Makin' license plates. Elwood P. Dowd: Oh, is that so? Interesting work? Mr. Miggles: I can tak...
Ariadne: Cobb can't build anymore, can he? Arthur: I don't know if he can't, but he won't. He thinks it's safer if he doesn't know the layouts. Ariadne: Why? Arthur: He won't tell me. But I think it's Mal. Ariadne: His ex-wife? Arthur: No, not his ex...
King of Swamp Castle: When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I b...
Christopher Gardner: [about the spelling mistakes in the graffiti of a building] It's not H-A-P-P-Y-N-E-S-S Happiness is spelled with an "I" instead of a "Y" Christopher: Oh, okay. Is "Fuck" spelled right? Christopher Gardner: Um, yes. "Fuck" is spel...
Mother: [singing] Hush now baby, baby, don't you cry / Mother's gonna make all of your nightmares come true / Mother's gonna put all of her fears into you / Mother's gonna keep you right here under her wing / She won't let you fly, but she might let ...
Sergio: Tell us everything you know. Health Inspector: Okay. Okay. Yesterday, we received a call from a vet who had a dog brought in with an unknown disease. The dog went into a coma and a few moments later came to, and was extraordinarily aggressive...
Lindsey Brigman: I saw these things. I touched one of them. And... It wasn't some clunky steel can... like we would build. It glided. It was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. Oh, God, I wish you'd been there. It was a machine. It was a machine...
and half of learning to play is learning what not to play and she's learning the spaces she leaves have their own things to say and she's trying to sing just enough so that the air around her moves and make music like mercy that gives what it is and ...
You have everything within you to do great things in this world. Maybe, you are inspired to sing a song, write a book or poems, create art in various forms. Or you may decide to find a cure for disease, end world hunger, prevent abuse, or take a stan...
It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can only come from a really hot blue sky, the kind that makes even a concrete highway painful to behold and turns every distant reflective surface into a little glint of flame. Do you know how sometimes ...
We are earthbound creatures, Maggie had thought. No matter how tempting the sky. No matter how beautiful the stars. No matter how deep the dream of flight. We are creatures of the earth. Born with legs, not wings, legs that root us to the earth, and ...
The human body cannot survive being in temperatures over 200 degrees centigrade for more than a few moments, especially in the fast moving current of a surge. Trying to breathe in the dense cloud of hot ash in the absence of oxygen would lead to unco...
How remote we were too from the crazy musicians who arrived on a blustery fall day with the idea that, since this was a financial center, there would be a rain of coins from the tall buildings in response to their trumpet, guitar, and bass fiddle. Th...
