Why do people resist [engines, bridges, and cities] so? They are symbols and products of the imagination, which is the force that ensures justice and historical momentum in an imperfect world, because without imagination we would not have the wherewi...
How could she understand it then——that one of her greatest blessings would come only through her greatest wound?
Michael nodded tersely, eyeing a table across the room. It was empty. So empty. So joyfully, blessedly empty. He could picture himself a very happy man at that table. "Not feeling very conversational this evening, are we?" Colin asked, breaking into ...
But even if they could go home it would be difficult for me to tell you what the moral of the story is. In some stories, it's easy. The moral of 'The Three Bears', for instance, is "Never break into someone else's house". The moral of 'Snow White' is...
Of course Will was right again. But I realized clearly for the first time how desperate our plight was. It has been foolish to think we could rescue Kai. Now, wherever he is, it couldn't be worse than being held captive by pirates. Even cannibals wer...
I had a dream about you. You were playing the guitar like it was a piano, and I was impressed with my deafness. You played awfully, but all I could hear was I love you.
Money I don’t earn is worse than money I squandered—because not only do I not have the money, but I don’t have the trinkets, knickknacks, vacation photos, or whatever else I could have left over in place of my money.
I have sewn my own destruction, and it looks like a cat sweater. I knitted matching pants too, because that’s what lovers do. My feelings for you melted in the ice cream cone, and I’m afraid I licked it all up before grandpa could get to it.
You make me so happy I could frown. Let us dance like two rocking chairs at a KISS concert, and let us kiss like two people named Sam Asmas who’ve just discovered the meaning of the word palindrome, as well as the meaning of life.
Well, the old Autumn didn't know anything about reality. The old Autumn was quite happy living in a childish make-believe world where bad things didn't happen and where you could make up whatever silly story you liked and tell yourself it was true.
People don't know. We don't know ourselves so we tell ourselves what we really know is other people. We could say the depth of pain we feel for the lovers who've left us is because we knew them so well.
You want to know, but are afraid to ask, whether or not I found someone. If there could be anyone to fill that hole in my heart after I lost him. I did. "Life is futile," says my new therapist, Michaela, "and no one gets out of it alive. There is onl...
The textbooks are dumbed down to the where your kid sister could probably read them, and the teacher go over and over and over the same stuff anyway, drilling it into your head so that they can ask you one hundred multiple-choice questions to get it ...
I swear, if I could eat my children, I would. I'd consume them like some beast in a Hieronymus Bosch painting, but in a friendlier, more momlike way. Their little bodies make me salivate. It takes everything I have not to swallow them whole.
Maybe I didn't march to the same drummer as most people, but I could do things on my own and do them well. That was what I'd learned, little by little, in the year I turned sixteen. I was complete by myself.
The theory of evolution also had a very great effect in alienating science from religion and creating a world in which one could go about studying the wonders of creation without ever having a sense of wonder in the religious sense of that term.
Researchers measure that the average major-league pitcher puts 40 pounds of pressure on his shoulder by cocking and releasing the baseball. Curious how much more the body could take, those same researchers tested cadavers. The shoulder broke apart at...
I had to ride my bike to and from their god damn plant way up north in the high-chemical crime district, and reachable only by riding on the shoulder of some major freeways. I could feel the years ticking off my life expectancy as the mile markers st...
It's funny how you take things like electricity for granted. You hit the button that turns everything on and it just comes on. You get used to that and it just works every single time. So what happens when it suddenly doesn't? things very well could ...
I could not be a zombie. They had no thoughts. Their brains were gruel. They said little beyond "Brrr!" unable, even, to articulate completely what they sought. "Brains,"I said distinctly. "And I feel no burning urge to partake of any." Forsooth, the...
I cried to think of how lucky we both were to have found each other, since it was clear that we were the only ones in the world who could understand what we understood in the instantaneous manner in which we understood it.
