Beautiful publishers say beautiful things and then We're sorry, but no... and then more beautiful things. It's a shit sandwich with branston pickle and melted gouda. I read it out loud to the kids. I stick it to the fridge with the others. Some write...
One of the dumbest things you were ever taught was to write what you know. Because what you know is usually dull. Remember when you first wanted to be a writer? Eight or ten years old, reading about thin-lipped heroes flying over mysterious viny jung...
When you're a passenger on an airplane, you are told that in the event of a change in cabin pressure, you should put your mask on first and then assist your children. You can't help them if you are unconscious. A similar principle applies with your d...
A vine from one tree shot out, tripping Blaise. He and Merewyn rolled to the ground. Varian stood between them and the trees, which shot blast after blast at him. He deflected them, but even so the heat from the fire was scorching. 'Go, Blaise,' he s...
Gun up,' he whispered to Skosh. The word went back to invisible kids lying on the jungle floor. 'Set it in here,' Mellas whispered to Conman. 'Put Vancouver with his machine gun one-eighty from it.' 'He won't like it.' 'To hell with him. Send a fire ...
There was once a tiger-striped cat. This cat died a million deaths, and lived a million lives, and in those lives, various people owned him. None of those people he cared for. This cat was not afraid of death. One life, the cat became a stray cat, wh...
Perhaps the most powerful cause of the breakdown of the closed society was the development of sea-communications and commerce. Close contact with other tribes is liable to undermine the feeling of necessity with which tribal institutions are viewed; ...
She had thought, instinctively, that Victoria had a remarkably beautiful face. The face showed an alert awareness of life: her lips- full, overblown like clown-lips liable to laugh at the slightest provocation. She thought that her features were not ...
If I speak in the tongues of Reformers and of professional theologians, and I have not personal faith in Christ, my theology is nothing but the noisy beating of a snare drum. And if I have analytic powers and the gift of creating coherent conceptual ...
Society has put up so many boundaries, so many limitations on what’s right and wrong that it’s almost impossible to get a pure thought out. It’s like a little kid, a little boy, looking at colors, and no one told him what colors are good, befor...
It came to me on a winter day. Life so full and rich will fade. Though I wish it were not so, One cannot run from an expected fate. And as a steady gust of wind fell upon my face, It was then when I felt a chill and thus did then know; Though I wish ...
the lost women I need to know their names those women I would have walked with, jauntily the way men go in groups swinging their arms, and the ones those sweating women whom I would have joined After a hard game to chew the fat what would we have cal...
To gain your heart's desire you have to lose some part of your old life, your old self. To do that you have to have courage; without it, you can't make the leap. And if you don't make the leap you have only three choices: You can hate yourself for no...
Fairy tales in childhood are stepping stones throughout life, leading the way through trouble and trial. The value of fairy tales lies not in a brief literary escape from reality, but in the gift of hope that goodness truly is more powerful than evil...
Once, [Rabbi Chanoch] Teller was traveling with 16 of his [18] offspring ... while changing planes in Frankfurt, Teller noticed a German woman gaping. 'Are all of these your children?' the woman asked. 'From one wife?' 'Yes, God has blessed me with a...
Sometimes, one yearns for something.For the ultimate in happiness. I yearn for it,and don't know where to look for it any longer. And I don't know if I would recognize it if I found it. And the longer I look, the more selfish I grow.For I think only ...
Thinking outside the box' is ridiculous nonsense, since whatever you can do in a 'box' or closed environment is not 'thinking'. If I 'think' about a problem but limit my thoughts to certain dimensions - then i am not thinking at all, because thinking...
I have been enormously impressed by the role that pure chance plays in determining our life history. I was reminded of some famous lines of Robert Frost: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both I took the one less travl...
This plea comes from the bottom of my heart. Every friend of freedom, and I know you are one, must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an ...
My teacher's mind and my interest in youth has brought me to some renewed conclusions, and I pass them on earnestly to mature persons who are given to assisting young people off the trail. The dictionary has a word for them: iconoclast. It is defined...
Everything that falls upon the eye is an apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves & brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away...so familiar as to imply t...