Being a hangman requires you to take someone else’s life based on someone else’s judgment, and carry it out on someone else’s schedule. The job does not provide the same satisfaction that an ordinary murderer gets from smashing a skull. It robs...
One night I begged Robin, a scientist by training, to watch Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' with me on PBS. He lasted about one act, then turned to me in horror: 'This is how you spend your days? Thinking about things like this?' I was ashamed....
I’m not this unusual,” she said. “It’s just my hair.” She looked at Bobby and she looked at me, with an expression at once disdainful and imploring. She was forty, pregnant, and in love with two men at once. I think what she could not abide...
They also knew that there was a string of DNA at the end of each chromosome called a telomere, which shortened a tiny bit each time a cell divided, like time ticking off a clock. As normal cells go through life, their telomeres shorten with each divi...
St. John,” I said, “I think you are almost wicked to talk so. I am disposed to be as content as a queen, and you try to stir me up to restlessness! To what end?” “To the end of turning to profit the talents which God has committ...
For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it's the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short. Then the Readers die one by one and the Work continues on alone, although a new Criticism and new...
Every word that he had spoken amongst the amassed beauties of Macmaster furnishings had been a link in a love-speech. It was not merely that he had confessed to her as he would have to no other soul in the world - 'To no other soul in the world,' he ...
At the beginning of the war…I had to look in on the War Office, and in a room I found a fellow…What do you think he was doing…what the hell do you think he was doing? He was devising the ceremonial for the disbanding of a Kitchener battalion. Y...
Once a person has been poisoned by self-deception, he can't make decisions about himself as neatly as all that," Himiko said, elaborating her friend's terrific prophecy; " You won't get a divorce Bird. You'll justify yourself like crazy, and try to s...
It's the strangest feeling at the end of pregnancy: you look down at this huge belly and try to imagine how some little person, whom you haven't even met, is going to emerge from it any day and completely change your lives. First, you wonder how this...
I have dreamed of that song, of the strange words to that simple rhyme-song, and on several occasions I have understood what she was saying, in my dreams. In those dreams I spoke that language too, the first language, and I had dominion over the natu...
It would be perfect if everyone who makes love, is in love, but this is simply an unrealistic expectation. I'd say 75 percent of the population of people who make love, are not in love, this is simply the reality of the human race, and to be idealist...
Galadriel: The power of the Three Rings is ended. The time has come... for the dominion of Men. Elrond: [in Elvish] The Sea calls us home. Bilbo: [smiling] I think I'm... quite ready for another adventure! [Bilbo climbs on board with Elrond. Galadrie...
Vilos Cohaagen: Don't touch that! Get away! Get back! Douglas Quaid: What are you afraid of? Turn it on. Vilos Cohaagen: Impossible! Once the reaction starts, it'll spread to all the turbinium in the planet. Mars will go into global meltdown. That's ...
But you didn’t mention Orrigar I, the first king of the House of Chaldarina. He put an end to years of unrest and civil strife. Neither did you mention Ronnick II, the one who reformed the monetary system and forbade the Great Houses to mint their ...
In dog culture, when someone calls you, you should absolutely not come if that results in the ending of something you like or initiation of something you don’t like.
Meditation needs no results. Meditation can have itself as an end, I meditate without words and on nothingness. What tangles my life is writing.
Western man had relearned-what the rest of the world had never forgotten-that there was nothing sinful in leisure as long as it did not degenerate into mere sloth.
History warns us ... that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.
Why must you speak your thoughts? Silence, if fair words stick in your throat, would serve all our ends better.
You think that your laws correct evil - they only increase it. There is but one way to end evil - by rendering good for evil to all men without distinction.
