What happened next… well, I'm going to blame it on the fact that I was scared. And I had just flown or fallen or something through about eighty years worth of Time. Or maybe it was the beans. I farted. I farted loud enough that it echoed around the...
Some men escape the grip. Maybe their wives have no social ambitions; maybe they've hit a sentence or two in a 'dangerous book' that pleased them; maybe they started on the treadmill as I did and were knocked off. Anyway, they're the congressmen you ...
Well he should get over himself. He tried to get me burned at the stake in Brit History yesterday. Here I am minding my own business like a good little girl, and out of the blue Tucker raises his hand and accuses me of being a witch" "sounds like som...
Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflected the landscape. And yet ... and yet ... Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they wou...
The thing about hiking the Pacific Coast Trial, the thing that was so profound to me that summer -- and yet also, like many things, so very simple -- was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no...
I’d start by laying her down on my bed and undressing her. Slowly. Carefully. So she wiggled and stretched and soft pants escaped her lips. My hands would be all over her. My mouth, too. When she wore nothing but the blue scrap of lace between her ...
The books my mother read and reread provided a broader, more adventurous world, and escape from the confines of her chronic illness. Her interior life was enriched even as her physical life contracted. If she couldn't change the reality of her situat...
as long as there are human beings about there is never going to be any peace for any individual upon this earth (or anywhere else they might escape to). all you can do is maybe grab ten lucky minutes here or maybe an hour there. something is working ...
Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful. This is the reason why beauty is still escaping out of all analysis. It is not yet possessed, it cannot be handled. …It instantly dese...
He was becoming something the world had never seen before - a dream animal - living at least partially within a secret universe of his own creation and sharing that secret universe in his head with other, similar heads. Symbolic communication had beg...
At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the heart of man: one very reasonably tells the man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of avoiding it; the other even more reasonable says that it is...
All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel. All of them? Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown ...
All of the dissatisfactions he had felt in his practice of the art form he had stumbled across within a week of his arrival in America, the cheap conventions, the low expectations among publishers, readers, parents, and educators, the spatial constra...
I think about dying, but i don't want to die. Not even close. In fact, my problem is the complete opposite. I want to live, I want to escape. I feel trapped and bored and claustrophobic. There's so much to see and so much to do but I somehow still fi...
Many of my readers are women and some of them email me their thoughts about the stories I’ve written. Almost all of them find a delicious pleasure in being totally frightened by the strange and dark side of life. Perhaps it’s because horror books...
Compassion, however, should mean providing a mechanism to escape poverty rather than simply maintaining people in an impoverished state by supplying handouts. By doing this we give them an opportunity to elevate their personal situations, which event...
You know how the story ends. He escaped and went on to become the greatest chief Suntown ever had. He never built a shrine or a temple or even a shack in the name of Tia. In the Great Book, her name is never mentioned again. He never mused about her ...
Absolution is the washing away of sin. The promise of rebirth. And the chance to escape the transgressions of those who came before us. The best among us will learn from the mistakes of the past, while the rest seem doomed to repeat them. And then th...
Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those--in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed. Suffer them if you can’t escape them, but once you have steered clear of them, give...
The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the...
Stories serve multiple purposes. At a basic level they are great entertainment, which is essential for living a happy and healthy life, but on a deeper level stories help us explore issues that are otherwise difficult to address. On one hand a good b...