Anything I run across can light up the circuitry of my brain, and set me on an adventure. To research strains of yeast; hiccup fetishists; the proper use of inverse, obverse, converse and reverse; the ratio of main narrative to tangent, of forward ac...
My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day. I told them this story: In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every...
When { and and the Göttingen theoretical physicists} first discovered matrix mechanics they were having, of course, the same kind of trouble that everybody else had in trying to solve problems and to manipulate and to really do things with matrices....
At least a third of the world’s population are introverts. While they can pretend to be extroverts for a while, frankly, the task is exhausting. I hope Charlotte accurately portrayed the complexities of this personality. Contrary to common belief, ...
Perhpas if I call out to Rat he might hear," said the Mole to himself, but without much hope. Rat! Ratty! O Rat, please hear me!" he called out as loudly as he could, holding up his lantern as he did so, waving it about/ But the wind rushed and roare...
It is true that we instinctively recoil from seeing an object to which our emotions and affections are committed handled by the intellect as any other object is handled. The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with some...
The thing in jazz that will get Bix Beiderbecke out of his bed at two o’clock in the morning, pick that cornet up and practice into the pillow for another two or three hours, or that would make Louis Armstrong travel around the world for fifty plus...
I was working with a Crookes tube covered by a shield of black cardboard. A piece of barium platino-cyanide paper lay on the bench there. I had been passing a current through the tube, and I noticed a peculiar black line across the paper. ... The eff...
But you are crazy.” “I know.” She lifted a small box from the basket. “Do you know how I know?” Scarlet didn't answer. “Because the palace walls have been bleeding for years, and no one else sees it.” She shrugged, as if this were a per...
To prove to [her friend, Swedish diplomat Count] Gyllenborg that she was not superficial, Catherine composed an essay about herself, "so that he would see whether I knew myself or not." The next day, she wrote and handed to Gyllenborg an essay titled...
Jeffrey woke up, tied to the high-backed chair in his bedroom, nude. He could hear his wife giggling in the hallway, the hardwood floors creaking with her footsteps with what must have been someone else too. He was gagged, a tight cloth wrapped aroun...
Since dugpas wished to get you out of here, where you were safe, how else should they expel you than by causing you to expel yourselves by violence? When fools make war they expend their resources squandering money and life and food until the victor ...
Perhaps your hunger to belong is always active and intense because you belonged so totally before you came here. This hunger to belong is the echo and reverberation of your invisible heritage. You are from somewhere else, where you were known, embrac...
One thing I do know about intimacy is that there are certain natural laws which govern the sexual experience of two people, and that these laws cannot be budged any more than gravity can be negotiated with. To feel physically comfortable with someone...
He could hear her ramping up and rather than letting it happen, he silenced her the best way he knew hos. He lowered his head to hers, slowly, so she could see him coming. Her lips parted, in anticipation, in fear, out of breathlessness or a need to ...
Sometimes it seemed as if he'd always been very old. People said that time lasted for ever when you were young. That was lies. Lies and rosy spectacles. His spectacles were steel frames and time was those tattoos on Vasco's arm. They were more like t...
Emerson said, “Do you love me?” means “Do you see the same truth?” - or at least, "Do you care about the same truth?” The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance can be our friend.... The...
Anger is a consuming thing, a burning takeover. It sets up shop in your heart and head and murders anything else attempting to makes it way in. Life becomes obsessed with it, clouded with it, engrossed in it. You justify feeling with delusions that y...
I should go," I said thickly. "Let me know when you want to start practice again. And thanks for...talking." I started to turn; then I heard him say abruptly, "No." I glanced back. "What?" He held my gaze, and something warm and wonderful and powerfu...
Dimitri's voice snapped my attention back to him. "That's Adrian Ivashkov." He said the name the same way everyone else did. "Yeah, I know." "This is the second time I've seen you with him." "Yeah," I replied glibly. "We hang out sometimes." Dimitri ...
I imagined the Augustus Waters analysis of that comment: If I am playing basketball in heaven, does that imply a physical location of a heaven containing physical basketballs? Who makes the basketballs in question? Are there less fortunate souls in h...
