Did we have sex?" he asked directly. For about two minutes, this might actually be fun. "Eric," I said, "we had sex in every position I could imagine, and some I couldn’t. We had sex in every room in my house, and we had sex outdoors. You told me i...
Is that why you've been pushing me away? Because of how you [...] I waited for you my whole life. Yearned for you my whole life. After Tersa told me you were coming, I spent searching for you[....] I never gave a damn what you looked like--tall, shor...
Silence!” Korbolo snapped. He eyed Duiker. “You are the historian who rode with Coltaine.” The historian faced him. “I am.” “You are a soldier.” “As you say.” “I do, and so you shall die with these soldiers, in a manner no differe...
However hard he tried, he could never manage to make himself visible to human eyes and not because he can't, since for him nothing is impossible, it's simply that he wouldn't know what face to wear when introducing himself to the beings he supposedly...
This change did not bring me into the community of the others, did not make me closer to anyone, but actually made me even lonelier. My reformation seemed to point in the direction of Demian, but even this was a distant fate. I did not know myself, f...
That's the big mistake a lot of people make when they wonder how soldiers can put their lives on the line day after day or how they can fight for something they may not believe in. Not everyone does. I've worked with soldiers on all sides of the poli...
Is a PLONGEUR'S work really necessary to civilization? We have a feeling that it must be 'honest' work, because it is hard and disagreeable, and we have made a sort of fetish of manual work. We see a man cutting down a tree, and we make sure that he ...
Though reason must guide us in laying down standards and laws regarding animals, and in examining the arguments of those who reject such standards, it is usually best in any moral inquiry to start with the original motivation, which in the case of an...
I have been seeing dragons again. Last night, hunched on a beaver dam, one held a body like a badly held cocktail; his tail, keeping the beat of a waltz, sent a morse of ripples to my canoe. They are not richly bright but muted like dawns or the vagu...
That's the trouble with the world we live in, Dana. It's full of people just doing their job and ignoring what's really going on. Care about the rainforest until they get a couple of kids and enough money for a gas guzzling car, or some fancy hardwoo...
My chest tightens: seeing him so upset breaks my own heart. 'Don't you ever wish you could make that bit go away?" I say, feeling angry at the past. 'That you could erase those painful memories, forget they every happened, just remember the happy tim...
All of a sudden I became aware of a little star in one of those patches and I began looking at it intently. That was because the little star gave me an idea: I made up my mind to kill myself that night. I had made up my mind to kill myself already tw...
Sionnach smiled in the way of the falsely modest and added, "Forgive me for not standing, but I can't find the energy just yet." the answering heat flare was enough to raise the temperature in the cave, enough to explain the fine sheen of sweat on Si...
I am no fun at all. In fact, I am anti-fun. Not as in anti-violence, but as in anti-matter. I am not so much against fun - although I suppose I kind of am - as I am the opposite of fun. I suck the fun out of a room. Or perhaps I'm just a different ki...
I'd heard of Evergreen Care Center before. Cass and I had always made fun of the stupid ads they ran on TV, featuring some dragged-out woman with a limp perm and big, painted-on circles under her eyes, downing vodka and sobbing uncontrollably. "We ca...
It is a strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and troubles. And yet when King Laugh come, he make them all dance to the tune he play. Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fall, all da...
And they will pause just for an instant, and give a sigh to me, and think, "Poor girl!" believing they do great justice to my memory by this. But they will never, never realize that it was my single opportunity of existence, as well as of doing my du...
It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer...
I thought of many an autumn I had known: Seemly autumns approaching deliberately, with amplitude. I thought of wild asters, Michaelmas daisies, mushrooms, leaves idling down the air, two or three at a time, warblers twittering and glittering in every...
The second cause whence these rebellions sometimes proceed is the devil, who, in order to disquiet and disturb the soul, at times when it is at prayer or is striving to pray, contrives to stir up these motions of impurity in its nature; and if the so...
We walk until there aren't more houses, all the way to the part of the beach where the current makes the waves come in then rush back out so that the two waves clash, water casting up like a geyser. We watch that for a while and then Scottie says, "I...
