The web and its technologies are digital representations of everything we did before in a more private, bigger, faster and more empowering format than ever before.
The town was more than ready to accept the window dressing that hid the ugly truth of Joe's guilt. Some shared the secrets and kept the silence. Others would not have believed if they had been told. They would not have wanted to know. As those who sa...
I believe in God the way I believe in quarks. People whose business it is to know about quantum physics or religion tell me they have good reason to believe that quarks and God exist. And they tell me that if I wanted to devote my life to learning wh...
That was what her parents did not understand—and had never understood—about stories. Liza told herself storied as though she was weaving and knotting an endless rope. Then, no matter how dark or terrible the pit she found herself in, she could pu...
Where did you find that one?" "I have no idea. I'm a magnet for crazies, I guess." "They must be able to sense a kindred spirit." "Your one to talk. Don't you have more hordes of the undead to lead in a glorious revolution?" "Zombies not undead. Ther...
I learned about religion the way most children learned about sex, [in the schoolyard]. . . . They terrified me by telling me there was a dead man in the sky watching everything I did and I retaliated by explaining where babies came from. Some of thei...
Mai whispers, “Why did she have to leave? When she was there, I knew where I had her; she was safe.” When she was there? I winder. Who is ‘she’ and where is ‘where?’ I knew where I had her? Who are they talking about? Me? “You of all pe...
I wanted to listen to him, but I did not want to answer now. That strange responsibility we feel towards others when they speak, to offer them the solace of any answer. Poor humans! And anyway he had not asked a question. He was merely floating there...
What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later one sees how much and how awfully the fates differ. Yet what were the reasons for th...
OMG Danita, it’s hopeless out here,” I moaned while we sat watching her son’s football game. I did not want to laugh, but he looked so cute struggling to run up the field bearing his weight in equipment. As he worked on his Heisman’s highligh...
Beyond the boundaries of herself, her parents and the enclosing garden walls, were open fields and other waiting places she still knew nothing of – lies of the land, perhaps. What Katie did know is that out there in the lonely nowhere was a special...
I'd never felt so helpless - so hopeless - in my life as I did there. To be completely under someone's power, with no one to turn to for help, to make someone feel like they're at fault for you hurting them . . . I realized that was exactly what I'd ...
But there were too many points at which the other self could invade the self he wanted to preserve, and there were too many forms of invasion: certain words, sounds, lights, actions his hands or feet performed, and if he did nothing at all, heard and...
Where did you meet?” he pressed on. I shrugged and considered a little rephrasing. “I was out for a run.” “From who?” I leaned back to take a long, very long, slow sip of that beer. Knox leaned forward. “I think we’re both bullsh*tting ...
Girls did that then – knocked themselves out to support some man’s notion of his own genius. What was Gavin doing to help pay the rent? Not much, though she suspected him of dealing pot on the side. Once in a while they even smoked some of that, ...
You can forget that other people carry pieces of your own story around in their heads. I've always thought--put together all those random pieces form everyone who's ever known you from your parents to the guy who once sat next to you on a bus, and yo...
I stare at the pile of discarded remnants and think of my mother. Did she touch that pillar there? Does her scent still linger in a fragment of glass or a splinter of wood? A terrible emptiness settles into my chest. No matter how much I go about liv...
... but he did not tell her, for he realised how petty it would appear to her, and how different from what she had expected, less sensational and less touching; he was afraid, too, lest, disillusioned in the matter of art, she might at the same time ...
Little girls grow up thinking that knights in shining armor actually exist. But they don't. And if those valiant heroes ever did bless this world with their chivalrous deeds, I imagine, just like Christ's apostles, they were destroyed by envy on...
When the marketplace became crowded with scores of similar products that mostly did what they were supposed to do, companies focused less on selling that product, and more on selling you a relationship with the product, and a means of announcing your...
A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useles...
