Put the number seven in front of a mirror and what do you have? If you answered 77, then perhaps you talk to yourself in the mirror, and wait for a response from your reflection. Seven standing in front of a mirror equals seven. Two plus two equals y...
I picture the vast realm of the sciences as an immense landscape scattered with patches of dark and light. The goal towards which we must work is either to extend the boundaries of the patches of light, or to increase their number. One of these tasks...
She started life with a number, not a name. Class: S, No. 13295. She has them memorized by rote, though nobody ever calls her that. The Scientists feel foolish addressing her in long, bewildering strings of alphanumerics. They have told her so themse...
When we'd moved in, she'd welcomed us. When Marius moved out, I sat on her floor and cried. I suppose I could have called any number of our friends, but that was the problem. They were friends. Even now, when I see them, which isn't as often as I sho...
Most people would have probably lost count around seven. This was, Harry knew from his extensive reading on logic and arithmetic, the largest number that most people could visually appreciate. Put seven dots on a page, and most people can take a quic...
When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to sp...
The best way to measure how much you've grown isn't by inches or the number of laps you can now run around the track, or even your grade point average-- though those things are important, to be sure. It's what you've done with your time, how you've c...
There would be a spike in the number of girls who went out for a walk in the woods and were never heard from again. There always were when stories came out portraying the terra indigene as furry humans who just wanted to be loved. Most of the terra i...
When in the puppet-show of dreams we hold in hand the strings of quite a number of actors, controlling their actions and their speech, we are not aware of this being so. Only one of them is myself, the dreamer. In him I act and speak immediately, whi...
Each of us has interests which conflict the interests of everybody else... 'everybody else' we call 'society'. It's a powerful opponent and it always wins. Oh, here and there an individual prevails for a while and gets what he wants. Sometimes he sto...
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 ...
I had a dream about you. You were cooking me dinner, and I was standing by the stove questioning your every move. You found me ungrateful, and I found the number for Chinese takeout. I may not have wanted your food, but I still wanted your love. Your...
I had a dream about you. I was a sleeping bag salesman, and you sold insomnia. I tried talking you into selling sex instead, because that way we could sell combo packages. But you said no, because you didn’t want to infringe on your grandma’s sal...
Outside the door, a teller with a blue rosette chomps on an apple and asks for my number. She smiles a thank you and reveals a ghastly, gaping tunnel of masticated apple, edge with violent mauve lipstick seemingly applied by Bette Davis in What Ever ...
Rule number one of anime," Simon said. He sat propped up against a pile of pillows at the foot of his bed, a bag of potato chips in one hand and the TV remote in the other. He was wearing a black T-shirt that said I BLOGGED YOUR MOM and a pair of jea...
As the nation divided into Federalists and Republicans, each group called the other the worst name possible: "party". Most Americans feared the idea of party; believing that a society should unite to achieve the public good, they denounced parties as...
Ever peaceful be you slumber Though your days were few in number On this earth-spite took its toll- Yet shall heaven have your soul With pure love we did regard you For your loved one did we guard you But you came not to the groom Only to a chill dar...
Back in 1982, when there were still only a manageable number of 'X-Men' titles on the racks (by which I mean just one), Marvel quite reasonably figured the world could stand another team of beleaguered mutant superheroes. And so were born 'The New Mu...
Vogue began to focus on the body as much as on the clothes, in part because there was little they could dictate with the anarchic styles...In a stunning move, an entire replacement culture was developed by naming a 'problem' where it had scarcely exi...
I think probably kindness is my number one attribute in a human being. I'll put it before any of the things like courage or bravery or generosity or anything else. Brian Sibley: Or brains even? Oh gosh, yes, brains is one of the least. You can be a l...
Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such d...
