[last lines] 40-Year-Old Mattie: I had the body removed to our plot and I have visited it over the years. No doubt people talk about that. They say, "Well, she hardly knew the man. Isn't she a cranky old maid?" It is true, I have not married. I never...
Woody: [thinks Buzz has gone crazy] Let's get you out of here Buzz... Buzz: Don't you get it? [points to a doll's hat on his head] Buzz: You see the hat? I am Mrs. Nesbitt! [laughs hysterically] Woody: Snap out of it, Buzz! [opens Buzz's helmet, slap...
Virgil: Linds, I want you to stay away from that guy. I mean it. Alan "Hippy" Carnes: The guy is gone. Did you see his hands? Lindsey Brigman: What? He got the shakes? Virgil: Look, he's operating on his own. He's cut off from his chain of command. H...
Nick Fury: I gave you this detail so you could keep a close eye on things. Clint Barton: Well I see better from a distance. Nick Fury: Are you seeing anything that might set this thing off? Clint Barton: No one's come or gone. And Selvig's clean. No ...
Except now everything is digital even murder. There is a record for everything under the sun from the moon and back whether we like it or not. The image that I have of the future is that it is very bleak. It is darkness visible. The black dog of depr...
Mild depression is a gradual and sometimes permanent thing that undermines people the way rust weakens iron. It is too much grief at too slight a cause, pain that takes over from the other emotions and crowds them out. Such depression takes up bodily...
Bugle" Black beetles know where the most recent bones bake in the heat, tendons and meat long gone, bleached white, and if you give them cheap wine -- drizzle a few red drops on a flat stone-- they will lead you to a barren gulch surrounded by sages ...
In the bitter waves of woe, Beaten and tossed about By the sullen winds that blow From the desolate shores of doubt, When the anchors that faith had cast Are dragging in the gale, I am quietly holding fa...
Instant Reading. A certain famous Fakir was claiming in the village that he could teach an illiterate person to read by a lightning technique. Nasrudin stepped out of the crowd: 'Very well, teach me – now.' The Fakir touched the Mulla's forehead, a...
She's finding it hard to cope - her hopes have been dashed, the future she dreamed about has gone and she's scared about that. There's nothing in its place. She wants you back. She doesn't want to let go of everything it meant to her. Because the w...
If we're lucky, writer and reader alike, we'll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we'll ponder what we've just written or read; maybe our hearts or intellects will have been moved off the pe...
We are only chance visitants to this jungle of blind mutations. The natural world existed when we did not, and it will continue to exist long after we are gone. The supernatural crept into life only when the door of consciousness was opened in our he...
There's a Good Book about goodness and how to be good and so forth, but there's no Evil Book about how to be evil and how to be bad. The Devil had no prophets to write his Ten Commandments, and no team of authors to write his biography. His case has ...
Superorganism. A biologist coined that word for our great African ant colonies, claiming that consciousness and intelligence resided not in the individual ant but in the collective ant mind. The trail of red taillights stretching to the horizon as da...
A person with less knowledge and more self-confidence (which is primarily a way of thinking and acting) will often run circles around a person with more knowledge and less self-confidence; which means that self-confidence has the upper hand to knowle...
You think that drinking with a serial killer takes you into the midnight currents of the culture? I say bullshit. There's been twelve TV documentaries, three movies and eight books about me. I'm more popular than any of these designed-by-pedophile po...
Raven had been shunned and abandoned throughout his life. Friends often came and went without a word or worse, they toyed with his emotions and shared his secrets with those he chose to distrust. His loneliness was inevitable and his secrets were dam...
We love Christmas presents but not Christ; Easter baskets but not crosses. We want to tell our friends with cancer that we will pray for them (we don’t) and our puddle-eyed children that their goldfish have gone to heaven (doubtful). When we lose o...
The warden always seems to know which book to bring. When the sun is gunslinger blue, the warden brings a western. When rain slates against the towers and the world has gone hopeless with gray, it is Bible stories. When the halls ring with the cries ...
My darling, I'm waiting for you — how long is a day in the dark, or a week? The fire is gone now, and I'm horribly cold. I really ought to drag myself outside but then there would be the sun. . . I'm afraid I waste the light on the paintings and on...
I think maybe, when I was very young, I witnessed a chaste cheek kiss between the two when it was impossible to avoid. Christmas, birthdays. Dry lips. On their best married days, their communications were entirely transactional: 'We're out of milk ag...
