It is hard to meet a stranger. Even the greatest extravert meeting even the meekest stranger knows a certain dread, though he may not know he knows it. Will he make a fool of me wreck my image of myself invade me destroy me change me? Yes, that he wi...
Society can give its young men almost any job and they'll figure how to do it. They'll suffer for it and die for it and watch their friends die for it, but in the end, it will get done. That only means that society should be careful about what it ask...
The moment you realize that life will hurt more than your death. While existing, we're forced to become acquainted with sadness. There's no antibiotic for the ridding of distress, and no alleviation of these intervals of pain we must encounter. Behin...
The great thing about the Internet isn't that you can reconnect with old friends or stay up to date with developing world events or send pictures of newborns immediately around the world. It is simply that you can log on to jcpenney.com from anywhere...
In all societies, public rhetoric involves some measure of lying, and history -- political history and art history -- is made when someone effectively confronts the lie. But in really scary societies public conversation is an exercise in using words ...
That's right,' Mel said. 'Some vassal would come along and spear the bastard in the name of love. Or whatever the fuck it was they fought over in those days.' Same things we fight over these days,' Terri said. Laura said, 'Nothing's changed.
Besides its content and methods, the cuisine devised by squaws and hillbilly women, as well as slave women, had another thing in common, which was the belief that you made do with whatever you could lay hands on--pigs' entrails, turnip tops, cowpeas,...
She wasn’t crying at all. This was what scared him the most. Where had she locked up the things he’d seen her feeling that day when she heard? She wasn’t that big a girl to hold all of it—to hold her brother’s life and his death inside of h...
For readers worldwide, the attraction of romance novels seems to be that they provide hope, strength, and the assurance that happy endings are possible. Romance makes the promise that no matter how bleak things sometimes look, in the end everything w...
You can't expect anyone to trust revelation if he hasn't experienced it himself. Those who haven't only know reason. And since revelation is a thing apart, and cannot be accounted for reasonably, they never will believe you. This is the great divisio...
But I could tell thee of other things, , and do not doubt what thou simply cannot see nor cannot hear. Thou canst not hear what a dog hears. Nor canst thou smell what a dog smells. But already thou hast experienced a little of what can happen to man.
There are times when friendship feels like running down a hill together as fast as you can, jumping over things, spinning around, and you don't care where you're going, and you don't care where you've come from, because all that matters is speed, and...
Go to Old Delhi,and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundred of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them.They know they are next, yet...
The Idea of Ghost, like the Idea of North. A mere looped whisper, in darkness or in light. And no matter what this person may have been like before he or she died, no matter what they--specifically--might have wanted, ghosts only really want one thin...
And in the past, Archie wondered, was it just that fewer people cheated? Were they more honest, and did they leave their front doors open, did they leave their kids with the neighbors, pay social calls, run up tabs with the butcher? The funny thing a...
We've been brainwashed into believing that it's a sin to discriminate. But discrimination doesn't mean racism; it means telling unlike things apart.
But we know that we are no longer the same, and not only know that we are no longer the same, but know in what we are no longer the same, you wiser but not sadder, and I sadder but not wiser, for wiser I could hardly become without grave personal inc...
Rigel, Betelgeuse, and Orion. There was no finer church, no finer choir, than the stars speaking in silence to the many consumptives silently condemned, a legion upon the dark rooftops. The wind came down from the north like a runner in lacrosse, vio...
But whatever any of them thought one thing was always certain: even though they suffered and had to struggle at times to bring meaning and even the most basic dignity into their existence and even though in their search for justice and truthfulness t...
In real life people do occasionally act out of character or do things we wouldn’t normally expect them to do. In fiction, there should be a good reason for a character to do something outside of the ordinary.
Before long, everyone was giving him answers, and feeling a little superior, because it was really remarkable the number of things Chrestomanci seemed not to know. He had heard of Hitler, though he asked Brian to refresh his memory about him, but he ...
