In his mind, Inman likened the swirling paths of vulture flight to the coffee grounds seeking pattern in his cup. Anyone could be oracle for the random ways things fall against each other. It was simple enough to tell fortunes if a man dedicated hims...
Excuse me, Ben," Bowen said. "Am I wrong, or aren't you the corporate treasurer?" Glisan bristled. "Yes." "What do you mean, you think you can get one?" Bowen shot back. "This is the current fucking maturities schedule! Go get it. You have to have a ...
The de-spiritualization of asceticisms is probably the event in the current intellectual history of mankind that is the most comprehensive and, because of its large scale, the hardest to perceive, yet at once the most palpable and atmospherically pow...
We need to gather everyone we can. Damien scoffed. Uh, boss, hate to be a pall, but I think everyone we can gather is currently in this room. Sin paused to look at Simi, Xirena, Damien, Kat, Kish, and Xypher. It was a pitiful number of defenders. But...
See? Nothing to it." "I see all right," Carly said, her tone full of awe. She gaped at him. "What?" "Um..." "Jesus, Carly, what is it?" He spun around to make sure there wasn't something behind him that would justify her reaction and the look of impr...
Thankfully, Coach had taught me a way of embracing the pain. He called that overwhelming rust of hurt 'The Moment of No Return', a point of pure agony when the body told an athlete to quit, to rest, because the pain was so damn tough. It was a tippin...
... primitive times had required primitive obedience, that later generations evolved to the point where parents offered themselves as sacrifice - as in the dark knights of the ovens which pocked old earth history - and that current generations had to...
Read things you're sure will disagree with your current thinking. If you're a die-hard anti-animal person, read Meat. If you're a die-hard global warming advocate, read Glenn Beck. If you're a Rush Limbaugh fan, read James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher...
The English language is the tongue now current in England and her colonies throughout the world and also throughout the greater part of the United States of America. It sprang from the German tongue spoken by the Teutons, who came over to Britain aft...
Since middle-class Western women can best be weakened psychologically now that we are stronger materially, the beauty myth, as it has resurfaced in the last generation, has had to draw on more technological sophistication and reactionary fervor than ...
...his knees were held together by the skin-tight trousers, which consequently narrowed the aperture through which great quantities of malodorous, rancid dreck were shortly to emerge with great force. St John knew that this was likely to prove troubl...
My very core clenches and spasms, my hips with a mind of their own, lurch. It is as if I no longer have control of any part of my body. ‘Ugh,’ I continue to groan in relief. And then, slowly, the rush is over and I am able to part my eyelids agai...
When she was eighteen years old she had almost drowned in the Kennebec River, not because of the pummeling current, but because she couldn't come up with a casual phrase with which to call for rescue. "Help!" was such a cliche. By the time she was wi...
The staying awake was a great self-sacrificaing gesture of friendship, and wonderfully in keeping with our current mood of intense friendship and religious fervour. We were all in a state of shock. We engaged in a long Dostojevskyan conversations and...
There, in the unconscious, we sleep upon the psyche's oceanic floor, together like some vast bed of kelp, each wavering strand an individual American, swaying in the currents of national suggestion. In the form of a giant Portuguese man-of-war, our g...
There are many things worth telling that are not quite narrative. And eternity itself possesses no beginning, middle or end. Fossils, arrowheads, castle ruins, empty crosses: from the Parthenon to the Bo Tree to a grown man's or woman's old stuffed b...
But love is much like a dam: if you allow a tiny crack to form through which only a trickle of water can pass, that trickle will quickly bring down the whole structure, and soon no one will be able to control the force of the current. For when those ...
Women are an eternal subject, which is a lot like being subjected, or subjugated, or a subject nation, even. There are comparatively few articles about whether men are happy or why their marriages also fail or how nice or not their bodies are, even t...
Gunner Ainslie made a face at his sister-in-law. "'Amateur' is a bit rough, Alice. I took a degree in archaeology, after all." She looked even more confused. "Then why are you a photographer now instead of an archaeologist?" "Because he didn't want t...
As I sit today, I am a genuine, often pleasant person. I am able to imitate a human being for long spurts of time, do solid work for a reputable organization, and have, over the breadth of time, proven to be an attentive father and husband. So how to...
Having always observed that most of them who constantly took in the weekly Bills of made little other use of them than to look at the foot how the burials increased or decreased, and among the what had happened, rare and extraordinary, in the week cu...
