Tell me about your family," I said. And so she did. I listened intently as my mother went through each branch of the tree. Years later, after the funeral, Maria had asked me questions about the family - who was related to whom - and I struggled. I co...
Mountains could be what happens when Father Earth eats something that doesn’t agree with him. When he burps, mountains pop up." "That’s absurd," Keselo said, trying not to laugh. "If you’ve got a better theory, I’d be happy to hear it," Red-B...
Its so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself. That's above and beyond everything else, and it's not a mental complaint-it's a physical thing, like it's physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out. They don't come out smooth a...
Anthropologist Gary Weaver suggested looking at culture as a kind of iceberg: one portion is clearly visible above the surface of the water, while the much larger chunk of ice is hidden below. The part above the water can be considered surface cultur...
I walked back to the window to look down at the people who shared this city with me. The people who made every day a series of mediocrities. The unreformed murderers masquerading as businessmen in borrowed suits and debt-laden cars. The voluptuous bi...
People are creators. But I doubt that many realize this. We are not meant to go out into the world and find flawless things, we are not meant to sit down and have flawless things fall into our laps. But we are creators. We can create a beautiful thin...
Yet the laboriously sought musical epiphany rarely compares to the unsought, even unwanted tune whose ambush is violent and sudden: the song the cab driver was tuned to, the song rumbling from the speaker wedged against the fire-escape railing, the s...
Not enough info makes for a lot of dead cats." "Dead cats?" "You know, 'Curiosity killed the cat.' And I have enough curiosity to start a feline genocide." "Feline genocide?" "Yeah. If you don't explain Apollo, the cat kingdom will crumble. Cats all ...
What is MONEY? a piece of PAPER, a chunk of METAL or just some bits and bytes. It’s been called the ROOT OF ALL EVIL, but it can also help UPROOT ALL EVIL. It can’t buy you HAPPINESS or LOVE, but some fall in LOVE WITH IT anyway. It can CHANGE wh...
William 'Wild Bill' Wharton: [Eduard has just been executed, and Paul comes up to the Mile to find Wild Bill sitting on his bed, ripping out chunks of his pillow and throwing the feathers around, singing loudly] Barbecue, me and you! Stinky pinky, pe...
Most people don't see half of what's in front of them. Your visual cortex does a shit load of imaging processing before the signal even gets to your brain, whose priorities are still checking the ancestral Savannah for dangerous predators, edible ber...
She went to the window. A fine sheen of sugary frost covered everything in sight, and white smoke rose from chimneys in the valley below the resort town. The window opened to a rush of sharp early November air that would have the town in a flurry of ...
Shergahn and friend lay like poleaxed steers, and the Daranfelian's greasy hair was thick with potatoes, carrots, gravy, and chunks of beef. His companion had less stew in his hair, but an equally large lump was rising fast, and Brandark flipped his ...
Standing there, peering around his room, Pete realized something that should have dawned on him years ago: Science really did suck. (Russell was right.) There just wasn’t any point to it. Sure, in its most altruistic distillation, science saved liv...
Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy from (wife) within the household’s walls by stalling its flow...
The thing about old friends is not that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that disastrous New Year's Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne, and how you wore that red maternity dress until everyone was sick of seeing the b...
I just believe that us as women— should not criticize nor pull down other women. And why? Because we’re all just trying our best to be beautiful! We all just want to be loved, we want to be beautiful, we’re all trying to leave our own legacy! T...
One time I took my knife and sliced off the end of a hog’s nose, just like a piece of salami. The hog went crazy for a few seconds. Then it sat there looking kind of stupid. So I took a handful of salt and rubbed it on the wound. Now that hog reall...
