I just got a world record. It has music from Europe, Asia, North America, all over the globe. Michael Phelps also has a world record, but you can’t dance to it like you can mine. And after we dance, we can make love like Michael Phelps makes retire...
Something is missing, and it's something not so easy to name as semiabsent husbands, not so easy to point to as a lack of work, or too much work, or a lack of adequate child care. It's the sense that life should have led up to more than it has. A sen...
The book that simply demands to be read, for no good reason, is asking us to change our lives by putting aside what we usually think of as good reasons. It's asking us to stop calculating. It's asking us to do something for the plain old delight and ...
Endlessly foremost, the recollection of youth’s fount flows deep in the psyche of an aged man. The loss of a first true love is never quite lost, for he sees her in the faces of passing strangers, is haunted in the quiet of his solitude as he waltz...
Cold comradeship do stars provide. They light the closer, inner side Of night's vast weight, which, chill and clear, Pulls on us like some puppeteer. Its unseen threads to heads and hearts Attached, it acts us through our parts, From birth's first cr...
In the agricultural age, women conceived younger and had many more children because children were economic assets as workers on the farm. In the postindustrial age, children are emotional assets but economic liabilities, costing both a middle-class h...
I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sent...
We know the value of the things for which we suffer. In this modern day and age, things and people are not actually losing value; but it is the knowledge of the value that is lost. Because in this day and age, everyone wants something that is easy. T...
Are not lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and...
The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the...
Carmelia Montiel, a twenty-year-old virgin, had just bathed in orange-blossom water and was strewing rosemary leaves on Pilar Ternera's bed when the shot rang out. Aureliano José had been destined to find with her the happiness that Amaranta had den...
And Gandalf said: "This is your realm, and the heart of the greater realm that shall be. The Third Age of the world is ended, and the new age is begun; and it is your task to order its beginning and to preserve what must be preserved. For though much...
The Dark Ages gradually ended six centuries ago with the Renaissance, which seeded new ideas for a different world. The Renaissance ideal dominated our culture until three centuries ago, from the 14th to the 18th century, when it was superseded by mo...
Hermione: It's not going to work. Fred: Oh yeah? George: Why's that, Granger? Hermione: You see this? [gestures to a glowing circle on the floor] Hermione: This is an age line. Dumbledore drew it himself. Fred: So? Hermione: So a genius like Dumbledo...
Lord Naritsugu Matsudaira: Hanbei? Hanbei Kitou: Huh? Lord Naritsugu Matsudaira: You think the age of war was like this? Hanbei Kitou: Perhaps Lord Naritsugu Matsudaira: It's magnificent. With death comes gratitude for life. If a man has lived in vai...
Tony Stark: Does anybody remember when I put a missile through a portal, in New York City? We were standing right under it. We're the Avengers, we can bust weapons dealers the whole doo-da-day, but how do we cope with something like that? Steve Roger...
Wanda Maximoff: I can show you what you truly fear! Ulysses Klaue: You know what I fear? Cuttlefish! Fish deep in the sea, with lights and big teeth. You going to show me a giant cuttlefish? You won't. You won't do business with me, and I do business...
Ultron: Do you see the beauty of it? The inevitability? You rise, only to fall. You, Avengers, you are my meteor. My swift and terrible sword and the Earth will crack with the weight of your failure. Purge me from your computers; turn my own flesh ag...
[Ultron begins to transfer his mind into an artificial body] Wanda Maximoff: I can read his mind now... [does so, and screams with horror] Wanda Maximoff: You said... you said we were going to destroy the Avengers... make a better world! Ultron: It w...
Without saying anything, Dara gathered her pillow and one of the soft comforters from her bed and carried it into Carolina's room. Mackenzie and Jennifer followed her. They would sleep in her room that night, keeping the ice packs around her, adjusti...
Then, almost as an afterthought, she turned and locked the bathroom door. If he thought he was going to seduce her, make her stupid enough to believe his lies by getting her into bed, he'd better think again. She stepped into the water. Besides, wome...
