He held her forever. Ashy flickers swam in his eyes, shadows of temptation drawing her into infinite depths. A breath away from his tantalising mouth, she parted her lips. The thudding of her pulse hurt. The knocking of her heart brushed her soul. Sh...
There's something in the act of setting out that renews me, that fills me with a feeling of possibility. On the road, I'm forced to rely on instinct and intuition, on the kindness of strangers, in ways that illuminate who I am, ways that shed light o...
After a moment, Wrath turned to John. "This is Lassiter, the fallen angel. One of the last times he was here on earth, there was a plague in central Europe-" "Okay, that was so not my fault-" "-which wiped out two-thirds of the human population." "I'...
I was aware of Darwin's views fourteen years before I adopted them and I have done so solely and entirely from an independent study of the plants themselves. [Letter to W.H. Harvey]
I feel like I'm in a film about a struggling artist who keeps getting up at all hours of the night to look at his big, blank empty canvas. And in a way I am. Except that i'm not struggling. I'm Hector Kipling. I might be getting up at all hours of th...
I found myself suddenly jealous of the time when things were simple, when days centered on creek walks and tetherball, and your biggest worry was whether you'd have riding or sailing. There were no boys, there were no secrets or rumors, and there wer...
Because you were wearing a badge, customers assumed you were an oracle. 'What aisle is the desiccated coconut' 'How long do you cook a butternut squash?' 'What would you have with a pan fried red mullet?' 'Where can I find the holy grail?' Enough alr...
Yet what happened in fact? In the middle of the night John woke up and saw me sleeping beside him with no doubt a look of peace on my face, even of bliss, bliss is not unattainable in this world. He saw me—saw me as I was at that moment—took frig...
So you're here by yourself?" “Yes." “Seems like an odd place to come by yourself." “I needed to get away." “Woman trouble? That's another of my father's expressions." “No, actually. I poisoned my neighbor's dogs." After a moment she said, �...
Unhappiness can be like a virus spreading from one person, to the next person, to the next one and so on. When someone is mean or rude to you, do not let their unhappiness infect your own life. If you are the unhappy one, please quarantine yourself s...
When you are relaxed about where you are at in life, things tend to flow more fluidly. It is as if you poke three holes in a bucket of water. The same amount of water is going to flow out the holes whether you let it flow or you shake the bucket. The...
Societies in which women have lots of autonomy and authority tend to be decidedly male-friendly, relaxed, tolerant, and plenty sexy. Got that, fellas? If you're unhappy at the amount of sexual opportunity in your life, don't blame the women. Instead,...
The conditions necessary for devastating epidemics or pandemics just didn't exist until the agricultural revolution. The claim that modern medicine and sanitation save us from infectious diseases that ravaged pre-agricultural people (something we hea...
Messages continued to arrive from the Earl of Warwick, urging Londoners to hold firm for King Harry. Marguerite d'Anjou and her son were expected to land at any time, while from St Albans, Edward sent word that Harry of Lancaster was to be considered...
Our sense of the full range of human nature, like our diet, has been steadily reduced. No matter how nourishing it might be, anything wild gets pulled - though as we'll see, some of the weeds growing in us have roots reaching deep into our shared pas...
Anthropologist Donald Symons is as amazed as we are at frequent attempts to argue that monogamous gibbons could serve as viable models for human sexuality, writing, "Talk of why (or whether) humans pair bond like gibbons strikes me as belonging to th...
But before [William Stoner] the future lay bright and certain and unchanging. He saw it, not as a flux of event and change and potentiality, but as a territory ahead that awaited his exploration. He saw it as the great University library, to which ne...
You can't kill an idea the way they try to. You can keep it down awhile, but sooner or later it'll come out. Now what you've got to understand is that the wheel's not evil. Never mind what the scared men all tell you. no discovery is good or evil unt...
She divorced her husband, y' know. I never knew him, it was before I met Jane. Apparently she came back from work one mornin' an' found her husband in bed with the milkman. With the milkman, honest to God. Well, apparently, from that day forward Jane...
John Calvin called the Book of Psalms ‘an anatomy of all parts of the soul.’ All the range of emotions are expressed; the Psalms weave an emotional fabric for the human soul. These inspired lyrics take us by the hand and train us in proper emotio...
Like investigation, healthy doubt arises from the urge to know what is true--it challenges assumptions or the status quo in service of healing and freedom. In contrast, unhealthy doubt arises from fear or aversion, and it questions one's own basic po...
