To speculate without facts is to attempt to enter a house of which one has not the key, by wandering aimlessly round and round, searching the walls and now and then peeping through the windows. Facts are the key.
They set down all their knowledge on bits of leather or waxed wood or tablets of stone and think that is wisdom. What good does it do a piece of stone to have knowledge?...know it is the understanding graven in the heart that makes men wise.
[In the theatre] Thanks.' He paused on the stairs. "And good- "Don't say it!" yelled Helena. "No whistling, no well-wishing." "I thought you weren't superstitious." "I'm not,' she said defiantly, 'but obviously there are limits.
There were days when no kid came out of his house without looking around. The week after Halloween had a quality both hungover and ominous, the light pitched, the sky smashed against the rooftops.
Housing is a human right. There can be no fairness or justice in a society in which some live in homelessness, or in the shadow of that risk, while others cannot even imagine it.
Do you realize that a middle-class couple, one archaeologist, one dolls' expert, can't move from their house because ancient spirits are blocking them in? It's a reasonable sort of day's experience, isn't it?
In her experience, groups of friends like that just didn't open up to include underage, undersized geeks like her. They hadn't sounded mean, they just sounded — self-confident. Something she wasn't.
You're still here. No beer. I'm not corrupting a minor." "But a minor," she pointed out. "At least for beer." "Yeah, and by the way, how much does it suck that I'm an adult if I kill somebody, and I'm not if I want a beer?
I smiled back, the importance of manners, my mother always said, is inversely related to how inclined one is to use them, or, in other words, sometimes politeness is all that stands between oneself and madness.
Let's say that it belong to me as much as it belongs to anyone alive today. If I am, strictly speaking, living. The old word was undead, you know, but aren't all living things undead. I dislike imprecision.
Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the ho...
...killing Dirk, killing anybody, was not going to change anything apart from Francisco's f***ing ego, which was already large enough to house the world's poor twice over, with a few million bourgeoisie in the spare-room.
The committees scour the bookstores, printing and publishing houses, paying particular attention to secondhand bookstores. There, they requisition countless copies of 'Incautious Maidens' or 'Flames at the Metropole.' So that those who prefer the fal...
In adverse circumstances, every creature becomes something else, evolving or devolving. What makes us human is that we know what we once were, and, let us hope, we remember how to change back.
As the head of an expedition, you can't pussyfoot around being polite to everyone. You have to show your teeth once in a while; a little growling goes a long way.
Through a strange kind of geographic arrogance, Europeans like to think that the world was a silent, dark, unknown place until they trooped out and discovered it.
The ability to tell a good route from a terrible one is a valuable skill when leading an expedition. Unfortunately for us all, it was a skill I did not possess.
As far as I was concerned, a little danger of head-shrinking is a small price to pay in return for a people who have remained true to an ancient code.
Shadow is ever besieged, for that is its nature. Whilst darkness devours, and light steals. And so one sees shadow ever retreat to hidden places, only to return in the wake of the war between dark and light.
There was only the dark infinity in which nothing was. And something happened. At the distance of a star something happened, and everything began. The Word did not come into being, but it was. It did not break upon the silence, but it was older than ...
Minerva, kindly go to Hagrid's house, where you will find a large black dog sitting in the pumpkin patch. Take the dog to my office, tell him I will be with him shortly, then come back here.
