I've always resented the smug statements of politicians, media commentators, corporate executives who talked of how, in America, if you worked hard you would become rich. The meaning of that was if you were poor it was because you hadn't worked hard ...
As for the temperature of Hell, Miss Gray,” he said, “let me give you a piece of advice. The handsome young fellow who’s trying to rescue you from a hideous fate is never wrong. Not even if he says the sky is purple and made of hedgehogs.” He...
Don't tell me," Jace said, "Simon's turned himself into an ocelot and you want me to do something about it before Isabelle makes him into a stole. Well, you'll have have to wait till tomorrow. I'm out of commission." He pointed at himself - he was we...
She winced and covered her ears as Eric,onstage, wrestled with his microphone. "Sorry about that, guys!" he yelled. "All right. I'm Eric, and this is my homeboy Matt on the drums. My first poem is called 'Untitled.'" He screwed up his face as if in p...
All right. Are you going to come back? Do you want any soup?" "No," said Jace. "Do you think Hodge will want any soup?" "No one wants any soup." "I want some soup," Simon said. "No, you don't," said Jace. "You just want to sleep with Isabelle." Simon...
It seems like as we stand there I’m watching my whole life with Hana, our entire friendship, fall away: sleepover parties with forbidden midnight bowls of popcorn; all the times we rehearsed for Evaluation Day, when Hana would steal a pair of her f...
Sad is one of those words that has given up its life for our country, it's been a martyr for the American dream, it's been neutralized, co-opted by our culture to suggest a tinge of discomfort that lasts the time it takes for this and then for that t...
I vow to ingest only items that preserve well-being, peace, and joy in my body and my consciousness... Practicing a diet is the essence of this precept. Wars and bombs are the products of our consciousness individually and collectively. Our collectiv...
The thing is, and here we come to E. Gorey's Great Simple Theory About Art (which he has never tried to communicate to anybody else until now, so prepare for Severe Bafflement), that on the surface they are so obviously those situations that it is ve...
Never before in history has such a sweeping fervor for freedom expressed itself in great mass movements which are driving down the bastions of empire. This wind of change blowing through Africa, as I have said before, is no ordinary wind. It is a rag...
This just gets worse and worse," Rob Pierre sighed as he skimmed Leonard Boardman's synopsis of his latest gleanings from the Solarian League reporters covering the PRH. "How can one person—one person, Oscar!—do this much damage? She's like some ...
Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every ...
Matthew Arnold made the horrible prophecy that literature would increasingly replace religion. It has, and it's taken on all the features of bitter persecution, great intolerance, and traffic in relics. All literature becomes a sacred text. A sacred ...
See, far above arrogance and selfishness on the rankings of undesirable Lifestyle traits, topping the lengthy list of carnal sins, occupying its very own stratosphere of unforgivable reprehensibility, is lying. Without question, fibbing is the fastes...
The day I arrived in Yakutsk with my colleague Peter Osnos of The Washington Post, it was 46 below. When our plane landed, the door was frozen solidly shut, and it took about half an hour for a powerful hot-air blower- standard equipment at Siberian ...
We drove on in silence, Dad shaking his head in disgust every few minutes. I stared at him, wondering how it was we got to this place. How the same man who held his infant daughter and kissed her tiny face could one day be so determined to shut her o...
One notorious named Hiwa al-Balkhi, writing in ninth-century Persia, offered two hundred awkward questions to the faithful. He drew upon himself the usual thunderous curses—'may his name be forgotten, may his bones be worn to nothing'—along with ...
That thing you’re afraid of? That label you shy away from? That word that seems too bold? That audacious goal? The life you think you don’t deserve? Aren’t talented enough to have? Aren’t brave enough to claim? Fuck. That. Shit. None of that ...
Truth is, life is going shake you, it will rip you right out of your comfort zone;just when you feel settled, it will shock you with some trauma and make you face adversity in the most undesirable of ways... And here is the question of it all? What's...
The pollution of the outward environment we are witnessing is only the mirror and the consequence of the inward environment, to which we pay too little heed. I think that this is also the defect of the ecological movements. They crusade with an under...
But think about it. We’ve tried for over twenty years to do everything right, to save our money, to pay our bills, to raise our kid, and to live within the law. We’ve done everything the right way, at least to the best of our ability.” Rick gra...
