The Quiet World In an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, and also to appease the mutes, the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day. When the phone rings, I put it to my ...
These wonderful narrations inspired me with strange feelings. Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle, and at another as all that can be co...
I shall have to go. But-" and here Frodo looked hard at Sam- "if you really care about me, you will have to keep that DEAD secret. See? If you don't, if you even breathe a word of what you've heard here, then I hope Gandalf will turn you into a spott...
I generally find,' Clent murmured after a pause, 'that it is best to treat borrowed time the same way as borrowed money. Spend it with panache, and try to be somewhere else when it runs out.' 'And when we get found, Mr. Clent, when the creditors and ...
Q. But it seems to me there are circumstances that simply induce one to have negative emotions! A. This is one of the worst illusions we have. We think that negative emotions are produced by circumstances, whereas all negative emotions are . This is ...
O'Shaughnessy is hitting Denholt on the side of his head with his free arm, great, walloping, pile-driver blows. The two of them stagger together, like partners in a crazy dance. Glass is breaking all around them. Gray smoke from the six shots, pink-...
The thing, whatever it was - and no one was ever sure afterwards whether it was a dream or a fit or what - happened at that peculiar hour before dawn when human vitality is at its lowest ebb. The Blue Hour they sometimes call it, l'heure bleue - the ...
It meant leading my meta-life. Meta-life is the opposite of living in the moment. It's the syndrome of simultaneously having an experience and being an observer commenting on and questioning the experience. By observing something, you change it, some...
During World War II, when combat rations were tinned, meat hashes were a common entrée because they worked well with the filling machines. “But the men wanted something they could chew, something into which they could ‘sink their teeth,’” wr...
For he did not, he would have said, care for women; he never felt at home or at ease with them; and that monstrous creature beginning to be talked about, the New Woman of the nineties, filled him with horror. He was a quiet, conventional person, and ...
When [what you are deeply passionate about, what you can be best in the world at and what drives your economic engine] come together, not only does your work move toward greatness, but so does your life. For, in the end, it is impossible to have a gr...
Youth!! Ah, what a word!! And how transitory! But, how grand! as long as it lasts. How many millions in gold would pour out for an ability to call it all back, as with our musical myth, Faust. During that magic part of a child’s growth this world i...
Come here, let me share a bit of wisdom with you. Have you given much thought to our mortal condition? Probably not. Why would you? Well, listen. There's no one alive who can say if he will be tomorrow. Our fate moves invisibly! A mystery. No one can...
Christian consciousness experiences itself in a curious sense as LIBERATED TO FAIL, without intolerable damage to self-esteem and without any reduction of moral seriousness. We are free to be inadequate, free to foul things up, and yet affirm ourselv...
Things aren't like this," he kept repeating. "It shouldn't be this way." As if he had access to some other plane of existence, some parallel, "right" universe, and had sensed that our time had somehow been put out of joint. Such was his vehemence tha...
Who is he anyhow, an actor?" "No." "A dentist?" "...No, he's a gambler." Gatsby hesitated, then added cooly: "He's the man who fixed the World Series back in 1919." "Fixed the World Series?" I repeated. The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course,...
A streak of green fire blasted out of the back of the shed, passed a foot over the heads of the mob, and burned a charred rosette in the woodwork over the door. Then came a voice that was a honeyed purr of sheer deadly menance. Captain Vimes limped f...
Vampires used to be the Dracula types, but in the last ten years most of them have become weak, brooding androgynes that only go after teenagers. A friend of mine took the opportunity to rid his whole city of them after the forth Mormon Vamps book hi...
During the worst stages of my eating disorder, I was all-or-none with food—either bingeing or not eating. Much of my experience was, in fact, that if I ate anything, I would eat everything. I began to understand that this happened because I was sta...
I walk in the sprinkling rain like a lion. Pretty soon there won't be lions anymore. If I have to die to be a lion I'll die. I'm roaring, but in the language of rain and sand: I am invisible, I blend in, and I'm not hungry so everyone is safe. I can ...
For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and th...
