You pathetic humans! It escapes me how you endure any trial long enough even to breed, yet here you are. And why do your kind persist at all? Because every now and then—once a century, perhaps—ONE of you understands this: Death is what you accept...
And from the top of the building I look down upon the world and see the crowds of people in the city I have made and the world that I have created. This universe, my universe, dies with me. I will jump and I will die and yet, I will live, as I always...
And you know what? If there is a God, and it's that same God who's so eager to have temples built in honor of his greatness, and wars fought over him, and people dropping to their knees telling him what a wonderful, magnificent being he is? If this a...
Inexplicably, I felt drops of icy sweat dripping up my back. I am aware that icy and sweat are contradictory by their very nature and should not be able to coexist in the same freakish bead of ICK WHAT IS THAT falling up my back. I am also aware thin...
These bits of paper are covered with lies. They poison your minds. And so long as they exist, you cannot hope to see the world as it truly is.(...)You turn to them for answers and salvation. (...) You rely more upon them than upon yourselves. This ma...
One day, all those who love in the society of Auld Lang Syne shall meet again. In the New City of the Burning Heart, there, the veil will drop. The arc of the seas shall finally know the skies. Day and night shall end. The clock tower will crumble. T...
The two men's eyes widened when they saw me charging toward them. One of them dropped his hold on Grey, letting him sway dangerously over the edge. Both men reached for their guns, but it was too late. I was nearly on them. Fortiter. I slammed into G...
You can almost always find chains of coincidence to disprove magic. That's because it doesn't happen the way it does in books. It makes those chains of coincidence. That's what it is. It's like if you snapped your fingers and produced a rose but it w...
According to the Buddha, the failure to recognize the illusion of the self is the source of all ignorance and unhappiness. It is only by renouncing the self, that is, by dropping his ego defences and committing metaphorical suicide, that a person can...
A child's reaction to this type of calamity is twofold and extreme. Not knowing how deeply, powerfully, life drops anchor into its vast sources of recuperation, he is bound to envisage, at once, the very worst; yet at the same time, because of his in...
Look, Laszlo. I'll have the dentist with me, and I don't want to alarm her any more than necessary. So take Vanna out of the backseat and stick her in the trunk." Shanna halted. Her mouth dropped open. Her throat seized up, making it hard to breathe....
I don't know,' he said irritably. 'Is it meant to improve you?' She swiveled toward him, eyes wide with shock. 'Because nothing could,' he added. Her mouth dropped in astonishment. Blotchy scarlet rushed her complexion. One would have thought he'd sh...
A rose lay open in full bloom and, looking from my garden room, I watched the sun-baked flower fill with rain. It seemed so fragile, resting there, and such a silence filled the air, the beauty of the moment caused me pain. "What more?" I thought. "T...
Diversity is a survival factor for the community itself. A community of a hundred million species can survive anything short of total global catastrophe. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature drop of tw...
While National Geographic magazine had given me a taste of the world, the three-dimensional details of this moment - the tickle of the rain drops, the suck sound of my feet in the mud, the challenge of getting photographs of the monkeys, my immature ...
In second grade my second love wrote "I love you" on a scrap of paper and dropped it on my desk as he passed by. He was very shy and sullen. When he moved to another school at the end of the term, I was heartsick. I thought about him all summer. But ...
Would you please just talk to me? Please?" Sally's voice was beginning to take on a high-pitched whine. "Oh, good grief. For the love of healthy ears everywhere, quit your belly aching," Jen snapped, the clothes in her hands growing more wrinkled by ...
Didn't Chains tell you about the Golden Theological Principle?" "The what?" "The single congruent aspect of every known religion. The one shared, universal assumption about the human condition." "What is it?" "He said that life boils down to standing...
Surely, though, I must have stolen into the future and landed in an H.G. Wells-style world - a horrific, fantastic society in which people's faces contained only eyes, millions of healthy young adults and children dropped dead from the flu, boys got ...
You told me once of the plants that lie dormant through the drought, that wait, half-dead, deep in the earth. The plants that wait for the rain. You said they'd wait for years, if they had to; that they'd almost kill themselves before they grew again...
And as they drifter up their minds sang with the ecstatic knowledge that either what they were doing was completely and utterly and totally impossible or that physics had a lot of catching up to do. Physics shook its head and, looking the other way, ...
