...all I could think about was how both sets of parents had needed to make their decision, on whether to medicate their child, in a scientific vacuum. (p. 35)
She still remembered sitting for hours as a little girl and pretending to be a hassock. A foot stool. Because if she could just stay very small, and very quiet, her mother would forget she was there, and then she wouldn't scream about people and plac...
Me," Artemis blurted. "I'm the nut." Artemis could have sworn the squid winked at him before bringing the five-ton chunk of spacecraft swinging down toward the morsel of meat in its blue shell. "I'm the nut!" Artemis shouted again, a little hysterica...
Only here, long after midnight, while everyone else was sleeping, when nothing was expected of him, could Schwartz convince himself that he was working hard enough. These hours felt stolen, added to his life. The voice fell quiet.
When I left Queen's my future seemed to stretch out before me like a straight road. I thought I could see along it for many a milestone. Now there is a bend in it. I don't know what lies around the bend, but I'm going to believe that the best does.
I couldn't pick just one. The moment I'd touched the sugar packet, a thousand thoughts cascaded through my mind. I shook my head. Sam didn't know what he was asking. How could this small pink square of processed sugar be transformed into my heart's d...
She had dreamed some brilliant dreams during the past winter and now they lay in the dust around her. In her present mood of self-disgust, she could not immediately begin dreaming again. And she discovered that, while solitude with dreams is glorious...
and it was the pretending that might explain how she could smile so brightly while her mind felt nothing - as if, at these times, there existed a disconnection between outer and inner, a shutting off, and the key to her happiness lay in warding off p...
The boy could see in his father's gaze a desire to be able, himself, to travel the world—a desire that was still alive, despite his father's having had to bury it, over dozens of years, under the burden of struggling for water to drink, food to eat...
You could be a really great and fabulous person, but if your method of communication with a woman doesn’t trigger her physical attraction by “pushing the right buttons,” you will only ever be “just a friend” in her eyes.
Your life depends on a random stranger who could kill you, will probably disrespect you, and will most likely pay you much less than you deserve. But even those prospects are better than the ones you used to have. This is the life of los jornaleros �...
It was probably no accident that it was the cripple Hephaestus who made ingenious machines; a normal man didn't have to hoist or jack himself over hindrances by means of cranks, chains and metal parts. Then it was in the line of human advance that Ei...
Have you ever wanted to be somebody else? Today I fantasized about being my own identical monozygotic twin. How cool would that be? I could both be me, and yet be someone completely different.
Dust was time in material form, Hubert could no longer remember who had said it, or where he had read it. At any rate, a lot of time seemed to have collected in his studio, because there was a thin, almost transparent layer of dust over everything.
You know what kind of person it takes to run for President? Not normal. They could start out okay, but by the time they reach that level they've sold their soul to the devil so many times and stomped the guts out of enough people that they are defini...
She watched the tunnels as they flowed past: bare walls of concrete, a net of pipes and wires, a web of rails that went off into black holes where green and red lights hung as distant drops of color. There was nothing else to dilute it, so that one c...
As plain Jane, she had far more to risk than Lady Mystère did. Behind her mask she could be the mistress of his darkest desires, but without it there were consequences to her deception. It was the outcome of her deceit that frightened her. Tobias mi...
It’s a duress I’ll never regret succumbing to,” he murmured as his hands caressed the soft skin of her shoulders. “It gave me you. I never thought I could love someone so much that I’d be willing to let them go to keep them safe.
Like most complicated things where it's easy to get derailed, their marriage was successful because they mastered the basics. From that mastery they could weather anything.
No amount of wavy blond hair nor evenings spent with her plump lips applying just the right amount of pressure to his various pleasure points could make up for the rotting carcass of a soul that resided beneath all that beauty.
Bakersville was never going to be the same. She'd been to other small towns where the residents all thought serial killers looked like monsters, that no member of their community could hide such dark desires. Once upon a time, she'd lived in one. And...
