Their marriage hadn’t died dramatically. There were no adulterous truants or burst spleens or freakish lightning strikes or splattered brains over the highway. Their marriage had died of neglect and errors and abrasiveness. It died under a long pro...
On the other side of the ledger stood the fact that fotitude was useless against it (liquor). Even the mightiest potsman, a paladin who could match tankards with a whole alehouse of swag-bellies Falstaffs and outquaff the parcel of them, would see hi...
Bertrand Russell declared that, in case he met God, he would say to Him, "Sir, you did not give us enough information." I would add to that, "All the same, Sir, I'm not persuaded that we did the best we could with the information we had. Toward the e...
The witch who claims to forbear her magick for fear of causing the next Indian tsunami is really saying that she is powerful enough to kill thousands of innocent strangers when all she meant to do was water her mugwort. She can't be challenged to pro...
Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one l...
It was dark enough that I couldn't make out their features, but I could see that someone was cutting through the links of the fence. There was a sense of urgency about those that watched him, some of them turning to peer over their shoulders into the...
It pleased Aliena that they were all together: she and Jack and their children, and Jack's mother, and Aliena's brother, and Martha. It was quite like an ordinary family, and Aliena could almost forget that her father had died in a dungeon, and she w...
Being a monk was the strangest and most perverted way of life imaginable. Monks spent half their lives putting themselves through pain and discomfort that they could easily avoid, and the other half muttering meaningless mumbo jumbo in empty churches...
I worried I would miss it, and I knew, from losing Wyatt, that things happen the moment the soul is released. Wyatt had been there in the school, watching me, making sure I survived. Souls linger…they do. They linger a bit before they turn toward e...
Why couldn't it just not have happened? Why didn't they have time-travel, why couldn't he go back and stop it happening? Ships that could circumnavigate the galaxy in a few years, and count every cell in your body from light-years off, but he wasn't ...
I reached down and picked up a baseball bat at my feet and I flung it as hard as it could. It circled and arced high in the air until it slammed against the side of the dining hall with a crack and fell. I sat down in the dirt. Then I lay down in the...
We formed an impromptu circle just so we could look at each other and memorize faces. We hardly noticed the waiting officials. We hardly noticed anything but our little family whose ties weren’t loosening at all. In fact, this impending separation ...
Noc knew that his girlfriend was better as he got to the door of Kay’s living room. This he could tell by the sound of her screaming at Turney for some infraction on the Son of Time’s part. He opened it to see her soaking wet, cornering Turney by...
Human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of gl...
As he returned to the bed, he could see Vallant eyeing him warily, but he ignored this, sat on the opposite end and braced the pad on his knee. He ripped off the page and handed it over, but he began a second note even before Vallant had taken the fi...
Ugly and ungainly. The least dependable creature you ever met. Just when you think you understand her, she changes. If only I had a son," he said bitterly. Over and over he disparaged her, and George would have thought that Beatrice would be so used ...
I couldn't tear my eyes away from the blood. As odd as it sounds, I felt irritated. I'd just cleaned that glass when I first came in on my shift today. Knowing Jim, he'd make me clean them again before I could go home. After he chewed me out, of cour...
The worst type of crying wasn't the kind everyone could see--the wailing on street corners, the tearing at clothes. No, the worst kind happened when your soul wept and no matter what you did, there was no way to comfort it. A section withered and bec...
Tarrou had "lost the match," as he put it. But what had he, Rieux, won? No more than the experience of having known plague and remembering it, of having known friendship and remembering it, of knowing affection and being destined one day to remember ...
So asking you to take a moonlit walk with me, that would totally not work?" "What?" Again that glare. "Go away. Stop being an idiot. I don't even know you." "You're healing my little brother Bowie." "Yeah, that doesn't make us friends, kid." "So no m...
At first, I was shocked that Diane could even suggest this family reunion [on television], and then I realized this is just the way of the world, or at least the way of fin de siecle America. Not only would the next revolution be televised, but so wo...
