I am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly. I will tell y...
The architecture of the Minotaur’s heart is ancient. Rough hewn and many chambered, his heart is a plodding laborious thing, built for churning through the millennia. But the blood it pumps—the blood it has pumped for five thousand years, the blo...
I’ve long believed that for an award to gain prestige, all it takes is having one famous person win it—even if that one person doesn’t know about the award or the fact that they’ve won it. That’s why last year’s “Albatross Harbor’s Ma...
And now, when Mother called to wake me up for the New Year, I first wanted to pray, but it turned into thanks, darling, for all that God had given us this year. For his wonderful ways with us, even if we don't understand it all now. For his love, tha...
We are one knot in a great web of being, building out of the vast past and (with luck) continuing billions of years into the future, until the sun dies, the last of its energy reaches Earth, and our local light goes out. The most appropriate response...
I had also pled, the whole year, to be wholly relieved of my romantic attachment; begged to stop loving so much. But I had finally been given to see that my desire was what made me human; that desire was my glory and my cross; that desire had given m...
Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina. I thought I had this clear, two years ago before I started, but I am no longer sure how this works. Perhaps a patina is a process of rubbing back so that the essential i...
...freedom is of more account than the height of a roof beam. I ought to know; mine cost me eighteen years' slavery. The man who lives on his own land is an independent man. He is his own master. If I can keep my sheep alive through winter and can pa...
Dr. Yen Lo: Attractive plant you have here. Zilkov: Thank you, doctor. It's actually a rest home for wealthy alcoholics. We were able to purchase it three years ago. Except for this floor and the floor above it, which is sealed off for security purpo...
Captain Koons: The way your dad looked at it, this watch was your birthright. He'd be damned if any slopes gonna put their greasy yellow hands on his boy's birthright, so he hid it, in the one place he knew he could hide something: his ass. Five long...
The Count: To all our listeners, this is what I have to say - God bless you all. And as for you bastards in charge, don't dream it's over. Years will come, years will go, and politicians will do fuck all to make the world a better place. But all over...
Bob Woodward: Segretti crisscrossed the country, at least a dozen times. And always stayed in cities where there were Democratic primaries. Carl Bernstein: So if the break-in was just one incident in a campaign of sabotage that began a whole year bef...
The question that naturally occurs is “What would it be like if a star exploded nearby?” Our nearest stellar neighbor, as we have seen, is Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light-years away. I had imagined that if there were an explosion there we would have 4....
I loved her the moment I laid eyes on her. She blinked - her thoughts at the time were of another I could not win her heart 20 years and many others who did. I would have been there,any time - anywhere. I was there, though all those gaps all her hear...
Lola writes in her notebook: Leaf-fleas are even worse. Someone said, They don't bite people, because people don't have leaves. Lola writes, When the sun is beating down, they bite everything, even the wind. And we all have leaves. Leaves fall off wh...
Tuco: What about our parents? Father Pablo Ramirez: Only now do you think of them? To begin after nine years... Tuco: [startled] Nine years? [tries to laugh it off] Tuco: So it's nine years. Nine years! Father Pablo Ramirez: Our mother has been dead ...
Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath...
Lemme take your picture! You fucking bok gwai low got a face carved out of rotten potato cured in dogshit, runover with a towtruck driven by Hellen Keller in a puke fit on pills...
The feeling of the wind, the sound of rushing water, the sense of sunlight breaking through the clouds, the colors of flowers as the seasons changed - everything around him felt changed, as if they had all been recast.
Aren't you afraid of dying? Not really. I've watched lots of good-for-nothing, worthless people die, and if people like that can do it, then I should be able to handle it.
We truly believed in something back then, and we knew we were the kind of people capable of believing in something - with all our hearts. And that kind of hope will never simply vanish.
