...I take as a point of departure the possibility and desirability of a fundamentally different form of society--call it communism, if you will--in which men and women, freed from the pressures of scarcity and from the insecurity of everyday existenc...
I need a weapon,” Valkyrie muttered. “You’re an Elemental with a Necromancer ring, trained in a variety of martial arts by some of the best fighters in the world,” Skulduggery pointed out. “I’m fairly certain that makes you a weapon.” ...
I need you to get inside Wayne's head. I need someone who thinks a bit left field and in your own unpleasant way, Helen Walsh, you're a genius. He had a point. I'm lazy and illogical. I've limited people skills. I'm easily bored and easily irritated....
The large, gaping flaws in the construction of the stories--mad wives in the attic, strange apparitions in Belgium--are a representation of the life she could not face; these gothic subterfuges represent the mind at a breaking point, frantic to find ...
He says, "I would walk around the township and I could point them out, which girls had been abused. You could see it in them. There's a luminosity to incest. The taboo is so strong and the damage so great. Luminosity--do you understand? It travels ac...
She was licking something off the end of a wooden spoon. Red froze. His body reacted as if he'd walked in on her twirling half-naked on a pole.... Frankie was intriguing. Unsettling. Challenging He wanted to figure her out. He wanted to play strip po...
If you don't want to tear off the clothes of the person you're on a date with and jump into bed with them, then what's the point? I'd never date; instead, I'd have lots of good friends and hug them a lot and life would be easier and neater and uncomp...
What hurt him most of all, made him feel like a sick child aware of terrible wrongness and yet incapable of explaining it to anyone who might help, was that in spite of the evidence around them, in spite of what their eyes and ears reported-and somet...
When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, lik...
There is a point when the anguished soul finally despairs. A moment in life when the heart, the will, even the spirit crumbles. Some say that after much grief and drowning in tears, it is possible to pick up the pieces and carefully repair what was s...
Mama told me to make a special point to remember the best times of my life. There are so many hard things to live through, and latching on to the good things will give you strength to endure, she says. So I must remember this day. It is beautiful and...
Thereafter were the stars persuaded to depict compasses and quadrants, stripped of their names, given numbers, all but regimented into a grid, before they had had enough and reverted to their old subjects: dogs, dragons, herdsmen, bears. Take heed, w...
Le bonheur n'est pas une chose; c'est une pensée. Ce n'est pas un fait; c'est une invention. Ce n'est pas un état; c'est une action. Disons le mot: le bonheur est création.[...] C'est une praxis, disait- Aristote, et point une poiésis.
A popular form of overpriced torture wherein participants wake up at ass-o-clock in the morning and stand in the freezing cold until it's time to run, at which point they miserably trot for a god-awful interval of time that could be better spent slee...
Running a race assigns a point to a sport that often feels very pointless. It's an exuberant payoff to months of tedium. It's a way of crafting an end boss for a particularly cumbersome video game. It's a fun, monstrous reason to keep putting one foo...
A friend tells a story about taking his ten-year-old son to a Jets game. The game was being played during a driving rain on a freezing cold day, and the Jets lost by twenty points to a team they were supposed to beat. As they headed toward the exits,...
It has been said at various points in history that the current sum of human knowledge is but a fraction of that which was once known, yet now is lost. Likewise, it is argued with simple mathematics that any sum of knowledge we may yet accrue must alw...
Kuan Yin Speaks on The Law of the Spiritualization (Transformation) of Matter: “The earth is trying to teach humans that everything is spirit…Being human is an opportunity to bring spirit into all that is material…The quality and intensity of r...
Something is missing, and it's something not so easy to name as semiabsent husbands, not so easy to point to as a lack of work, or too much work, or a lack of adequate child care. It's the sense that life should have led up to more than it has. A sen...
There's no obvious reason to assume that the very same rare properties that allow for our existence would also provide the best overall setting to make discoveries about the world around us. We don't think this is merely coincidental. It cries out fo...
I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered something Father Tom had told me--that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includ...
