He calculated the number of bricks in the wall, first in twos and then in tens and finally in sixteens. The numbers formed up and marched past his brain in terrified obedience. Division and multiplication were discovered. Algebra was invented and pro...
I exist here, now. I'm not much interested in the future. Or, more precisely put, I do not believe in the future. To exaggerate a little, I have no faith that I will still exist tomorrow or the day after. What is more, I absolutely detest retrospecti...
Although some popular religious texts such as the New Testament, Quran, Bhagavad Gita, Tao Te Ching, or Tibetan Book of the Dead contain interesting insights and stories, it is the Jewish religious texts such as the Old Testament (Hebrew Scriptures) ...
The 'swapping' is interesting. This practice one had thought confined to certain earnest Americans in the smaller, more tedious cities, to those wives and husbands who had read sex manuals and radically wanted more of life even if it had to be, like ...
Does he know about me? George wonders; do any of them? Oh yes, probably. It wouldn't interest them. They don't want to know about my feelings or my glands or anything below my neck. I could just as well be a severed head carried into the classroom to...
Get real. They’ll try to kill us no matter what. I can find out how to open the files from Mickey. You may be impressed with this genius shit but you should really find out what a mess his head is. The right drugs, he’ll cut his own throat and fo...
Someday when you're twenty, maybe, I'll see you again. You'll be this hot soccer star at some great school, with a million guys more interesting than I am chasing you down. And you know what? I'll see you and I'll pray you want me still.
I admit that I myself am far from having a complete command of every topic I touch on, but my knowledge of my subject is always greater than the interest or the understanding of my auditors. You see, there is one very good thing about mankind; the me...
One of the most interesting results was part of a study my students and I conducted dealing with status in email correspondence. Basically, we discovered that in any interaction, the person with the higher status uses I-words less (yes, less) than pe...
He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in other people... I got the feeling that Julián was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for his books...
She's shed her skins and plasma jeans, gets around in 2K retro gear like the frock she wears today; a loose, white elegy to what's been lost. Already she's flowing back into herself the way a river flows to fill a creek bed. But some hard layer has w...
You reached into my chest with your words. When you spoke, my heart danced. Love muddled thoughts based in reason. Interest withered like a flower in dry heat then your words wrapped themselves around my heart and yanked it from my body. Now I stand ...
When kids made a decision for themselves they have a vested interest in showing they were right. Lee wanted to prove to me that he had made the right choice so he worked hard and did well. If we'd forced him to go to college somewhere else all the in...
Corn is the hero of its own story, and though we humans played a crucial supporting role in its rise to world domination, it would be wrong to suggest we have been calling the shots, or acting always in our own best interests. Indeed there is every r...
Well, Mr Thomas, while I'm in favour of education, I couldn't in good conscience recommend a university career in anything but the hard sciences. As a working environment, the rest of academia is a sewer of irrationality, hate mongering, envy, and se...
Out of the blue Sylvia said, ‘People are like boxes. You would like to open them up and see what’s inside, but you can’t.’ Sylvia was interested in people and recognizing how individuals create their own kind of camouflage- the ‘lids on the...
Adults discourage children from asking philosophical questions, first by being patronizing to them and then by directing their inquiring minds towards more "useful" questions. Most adults aren't themselves interested in philosophical questions. They ...
It is curious that people tend to regard government as a quasi-divine, selfless, Santa Claus organization. Government was constructed neither for ability nor for the exercise of loving care; government was built for the use of force and for necessari...
The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over, they propose to continue it. If they were allowed their own...
In this respect the differences between the USA and the USSR are those of evangelical dinosaurs competing for domination on one small planet: the first deifies Jesus Christ, the other Karl Marx. Neither has much practical interest in what those two s...
There is no evidence that we've been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite of...
