We were no longer, technically, children although in many ways I am quite sure that we were. Childish has become a term of contempt. "Don't be childish, darling." "I hope to Christ I am. Don't be childish yourself." It is possible to be grateful that...
Take any emotion—love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions—if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them—you can never get to be...
The Christmas presents once opened are Not So Much Fun as they were while we were in the process of examining, lifting, shaking, thinking about, and opening them. Three hundred sixty-five days later, we try again and find that the same thing has happ...
Perhaps the rest of the world was gone. It was the most plausible answer. Heaven knows she couldn’t see or think of anyone else. That must be the answer, they were the only two people left, as the Earth spun into a timeless abyss. Claire once read ...
God, the devil, and Orafoura were walking along a river one day when they came across three naked women splashing in the water. God turned to the other two and said, "Ten talents to the one who can get them fully clothed the fastest." The devil, alwa...
When you feel angry or frustrated at a brother for using a particular defense -- being controlling or whatever it is -- you are failing to forgive yourself for the very same attempt; you still believe that the defense has a reality. You are seeing it...
Breyona didn’t have to force a laugh. “Fellowship? Who do you think you are? Freedo the hobbit?” “It’s Frodo,” he said over his shoulder. “And if I was a character from L.O.T.R., I’d obviously by Strider.” Shaking his head, he conti...
Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable feminity....
See, the institutions and specialist, experts, you see. Yes, yes, experts, indeed. See, they would have us believe that there is an order to art. An explanation. Humans are odd creatures in that way. Always searching for a formula. Yes, a formula to ...
Share and Enjoy' is the company motto of the hugely successful Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaints Division, which now covers the major land masses of three medium-sized planets and is the only part of the Corporation to have shown a consistent...
So I suggested to Dimitri that maybe he should let me off this time. He laughed, and I was pretty sure it was at me and not with me. Rose Hathaway: "Why is that funny?” Dimitri Belikov: "Oh, You were serious.” Rose Hathaway: "Of course I was! Loo...
For our own part, we learned a great deal about the techniques of love, and because we didn't know the words to denote what we saw, we had to make up our own. That was why we spoke of "yodeling in the canyon" and "tying the tube," of "groaning in the...
There are times in every person’s life when they feel lonely, isolated, like maybe they don’t belong. For adoptees, this is often exacerbated by the circumstances. Because you were given up, you have a built-in scapegoat; you can blame everything...
These were the kids who would take LSD for recreational purposes, who relied upon tape recorders to supply the weird studio effects their music required and who could repeat the cosmic wisdom of the Space Brothers as if it were the Pledge of Allegian...
Kammy jerked upright. It was as though the trees had parted beneath the pressure of the storm and a bolt of lightning had struck her. She had never entered the mouth for it had always been much too small. Yet, she had never seen anything else enter i...
As his people positioned themselves in and around the pass, Arin though that he might have misunderstood the Valorian addiction to war. He had assumed it was spurred by greed. By a savage sense of superiority. It had never occurred to him that Valori...
By calling into question the very ideal of a universal, autonomous reason (which was, in the Enlightenment, the basis for rejecting religious thought) and further demonstrating that all knowledge is grounded in narrative or myth, Lyotard relativizes ...
Oh, now my Erin, she'd smile down on me no matter where I walked." Grandpop smiled that little smile again. "But I'd be separated from her, and I'd feel that separation in my soul, you see?" Nathan shook his head. Grandpop sighed. "You have the Irish...
But what I knew in my head stayed up there, swirling about the other ten zillion things I had retained. That knowledge informed my actions, what I did and how I did it. What Emma knew filtered from her head down into her heart and informed who she wa...
Here's what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara. "Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, o...
It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor's glory should be laid daily ...
