He smiled his shy smile at her as he went into the yard. Anne took the memory of it with her when she went to her room that night and sat for a long while at her open window, thinking of the past and dreaming of the future. Outside the Snow Queen was...
Dominion does not mean domination. We hold dominion over animals only because of our powerful and ubiquitous intellect. Not because we are morally superior. Not because we have a "right" to exploit those who cannot defend themselves. Let us use our b...
If you'd only let me come by myself, none of this would have happened. Having you around makes everything worse.' She buried her head under her pillow. 'Stop it! you're so cold! You're heartless, you little robot!' The pillow muffled her words, but t...
Has she glanced you way yet?" Twice," Nick said on a note of satisfaction. Meaning?" Nick glanced at him. "She's not completely disinterested." I see Moreland. That makes it an even half dozen hanging out for a rich wife. Four looking for their secon...
Being a vampire for him meant revenge. Revenge against life itself. Every time he took a life it was revenge. It was no wonder, then, that he appreciated nothing. The nuances of vampire existence weren't even available to him because he was focused w...
So, now I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon. I shall walk, as I did tonight, jealous of my loneliness, in the blue-silver of the cold moon, shining brilliantly on the drifts of fresh-fallen snow, with the myriad sparkles. I talk to mysel...
And Grace calls out, 'You are not just a disillusioned old man who may die soon, a middle-aged woman stuck in a job and desperately wanting to get out, a young person feeling the fire in the belly begin to grow cold. You may be insecure, inadequate, ...
People complain about cold weather during winter, about hot weather during summer and about rain in rainy season. People who are single are depressed that they are single, those who are married think that singles are having more fun, people with dark...
How do you weigh a soul? Is it heavy with love or hate? Does it deny the things it's done? Does it even remember its own name? Does it miss those it has loved? Does it long for the life it's lost? How do you weigh a soul? After it has paid the highes...
A big slice of the strange, a zap to the synaptic net, the shock of unending Otherness moistened with meaning, special stinks, grace notes, blaring daylight that illuminated without instructing. A marathon that addicted. To wake up from cold sleep an...
She told us about the goddess called Persephone, who was forced to spend half a year in the darkness deep underground. Winter happened when she was trapped inside the earth. The days shrank, they became cold and short and dark. Living things hid them...
As a youth, I listened to the rain from the bowers of pleasure houses, Red silk drapes translucent in the glow of candlelight. In my prime, I listened to the rain as a traveler, The sky low, the river broad, the calls of the wild geese harsh and cold...
As a teenager in Brooklyn Quentin had often imagined himself engaged in martial heroics, but after this he knew, as a cold immutable fact, that he would do anything necessary, sacrificing whatever or whomever he had to, to avoid risking exposure to p...
It was a part of myself that was my enemy; I still had a childish illusion that the flesh on my own bones was somehow unique and precious to the universe, in some obscure corner of my mind I wanted the others to love me and make exceptions for me sim...
Everyone rushes wherever his instincts impel him, the populace swarms like insects over a corpse, poets pass by without having the time to sculpt their thoughts, hardly have they scribbled their ideas down on sheets of paper than the sheets are blown...
So much of life is invisible, inscrutable: layers of thoughts, feelings, outward events entwined with secrecies, ambiguities, ambivalences, obscurities, darknesses strongly present even to the one who's lived it- maybe especially to the one who's liv...
I feel alone. I don't mean i feel lonely; I mean i feel alone, the same way i feel the blanket resting on my body, or the feathers of my pillow under my head, or the tight string of my sleep pants twisted up around my waist. I feel alone as if it wer...
One of the reasons why I liked living in Manhattan was that the city would share your mood the moment you walked out the door. If you were in a hurry, everything else was too, even the pigeons. You shared the same speed and sense of urgency to get wh...
Everybody wants to be on the mountaintop, but if you'll remember, mountaintops are rocky and cold. There is no growth on the top of a mountain. Sure, the view is great, but what's a view for? A view just gives us a glimpse of our next destination-our...
I miss the snow. I miss looking at it, walking in it, tasting it. I used to love those days when it was so cold everyone else would be tucked away inside trying to stay warm. I would be the only one out walking, so I could look across the fields and ...
And while you and the rest of your kind are battling together—year after year—for this special privilege of being 'bored to death,' the 'real girl' that you're asking about, the marvelous girl, the girl with the big, beautiful, unspoken thoughts ...