The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgment to have safely traveled from star to star.
We are searching for the same thing,” Stripey said. “How do you know?” Janco asked. “I read his mind.” The Sitian pointed to Ari. “Yours was too…chaotic. Too many useless thoughts to wade through.” A compliment or an insult? Janco gue...
When they began, they could not have thought that it would end like this, because their time seemed to them as simple as a flame. We know now that it was a very complicated time and that they were more complicated people than they knew.
When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity. And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.
As time passed from solstice to mild solstice in those occluded zones of my early childhood, I played beneath the distracted majesty of my mother's blue-eyed gaze. With her eyes on me I felt as if I were being studied by flowers.
Comely was the town by the curving river that they dismantled in a year's time. Beautiful was Colleton in her last spring as she flung azaleas like a girl throwing rice at a desperate wedding. In dazzling profusion, Colleton ripened in a gauze of swe...
We're almost there, Oliver said. Once again Petunia was so startled that she tripped and would have fallen is Oliver hadn't caught her around the waist and pulled her upright. "You must have been far away," he said laughing.
For women, marriages foreclosed often resulted in an accumulation of booty; for men, these failed projects of implausible optimism were more likely to manifest themselves in material lack. It was hard to resist the metaphorical impression that women ...
So often I have felt alone in my journey, yet I've been afraid to let anyone see my fear and weakness.
I felt his hardness and I suddenly understood-an older girl would have understood long before-that this was the currency of desire. He was my betrothed. he desired me. I desired him. All I had to do was tell him the truth.
In one of his puckish moods Saul talked the president of a university into letting him anonymously take an examination being administered to candidates for a doctorate in community organization. "Three of the questions were on the philosophy of and m...
He’s my brother, my blood. He annoys the hell out of me most of the time, but when it comes right down to it I want to see him graduate from college and have little annoying mini-Alexes and mini-Brittanys running around in the future
Carlos, are we in complete understanding with each other?” “Yeah,” I say. “As long as it’s not in your house and you don’t know about it, you’re okay with us messin’ around.” “I know you’re joking with me. You are joking with me...
Listen, I don’t know what the hell happened between you and Marco. To be honest I don’t really want to know, ’cause if I did I’d probably want to kick the shit outta him.” “I don’t need you to protect me.” “What if I want to?
When I was a boy, I naively thought that this thing called happiness would be something I would wake up to find every day once I could smoke, drink and fornicate.
What softened your heart?" I asked softly. "Good music and a friend." I felt my eyes burn a little and turned from him, blinking quickly to lap up the sting of tears. "Music has incredible power" "So does friendship," he supplied frankly.
I understood that if ever one wanted to live with someone you cooked for them and they came running. But then it is my idea of hell these days, living with someone. The idea of sharing your life with someone is just utterly ghastly. I know why people...
I suppose that saves us from having to determine what to do with a butler who goes around killing people. It certainly reflects badly upon our domestic staff. Still, I shall miss him. There was a man who knew how to brew a good cup of tea.
She was crazy. I could be too. It was my greatest fear, that I'd snap one day too. Just like she had. I wanted to live life because if that day came I wanted to have lived once.
Gradually, after being the target a few times of a similar capriciousness, which he discerned as default behavior for most people, and not liking it, Paul learned to not be more generous or enthusiastic or attentive that he could sustain regardless o...
What I'm going to do up here, kid, is tell you a story. Like all stories, it's an attempt to make sense of something larger than itself. And, like most stories, it fails, to a certain degree. It's a gloss, a rendition, so it's not exact. But it'll do...
