Girl going past clinging to a young man's arm. Putting up her face like a duck to the moon. Drinking joy. Green in her eyes. Spinal curvature. No chin, mouth like a frog. Young man like a pug. Gazing down at his sweetie with the face of a saint readi...
121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces 122. Max Planck – Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography 123. Henri Bergson – Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The ...
A key ingredient in appreciating what mathematics is about is to realize that it is concerned with ideas, understanding, and communication more than it is with any specific brand of symbols....It is almost as if ideas set in mathematical form melt an...
Perhaps this war will make it simpler for us to go back to some of the old ways we knew before we came over to this land and made the Big Money. Perhaps, even, we will remember how to make good bread again. It does not cost much. It is pleasant: one ...
Elliot - Elliot waved absently, making a decision right then and there. He'd take the trip that Patrick offered. A cruise down Europe's most famous rivers couldn't be any more disruptive than home, after all. Alice -I stood up shaking the laptop at n...
The operation would be in a week...I didn't know if I would survive. How I longed to go back to reading! There was nowhere I longed to be more than the university campus. I was preparing for a master's on fantasy literature. I was interested in why t...
...maybe she's a slut because she's lonely, she's sad, she's hoping someone or something will make the lonely and sad go away. It won't, of course. It never does. But nonetheless, there's not a girl who's more hopeful than a slut, more optimistic. Sh...
At the age of fifteen he had bought off a twopenny stall in the market a duo-decimo book of recipes, gossip, and homilies, printed in 1605. His stepmother, able to read figures, had screamed at the sight of it when he had proudly brought it home. 160...
We read novels because we need stories; we crave them; we can’t live without telling them and hearing them. Stories are how we make sense of our lives and of the world. When we’re distressed and go to therapy, our therapist’s job is to help us ...
She always used to suspect that the price for happiness, the price for enjoying the company of a person you loved, was the steadily increasing risk of losing them, and at times, when she considered the possibility that she might lose Isabel or Clancy...
Adrian Ivashkov wasn’t easy to surprise, but I surprised him then when I brought his mouth toward mine. I kissed him, and for a moment, he was too stunned to respond. That lasted for, oh, about a second. Then the intensity I’d come to know so wel...
...there is a celebrated aphorism insisting that the best way to live is to 'work like you don't need the money, dance like nobody is watching, and love like you've never been hurt.'...After years of hearing and reading these lines I have decided to ...
Usually, Shakespeare gives me goose bumps. The guy knows everything. Like some ancient angel quill-ing out blueprints life. Hiding it in fiction. And usually I love the sound of the words, the way they dance on the page. Today, they fall flat. My att...
Cards and boards, [Johnny] thought. And the dead. That's not dark forces. Making a fuss about cards and heavy metal and going on about Dungeons and Dragons stuff because it's got demon gods in it is like guarding to door when is really coming up thro...
I am, as far as I can tell, about a month behind Lord Byron. In every town we stop at we discover innkeepers, postillions, officials, burghers, potboys, and all kinds and sorts of ladies whose brains still seem somewhat deranged from their brief expo...
I have seen many cases like N. during the five years I've been in practice. I sometimes picture these unfortunates as men and women being pecked to death by predatory birds. The birds are invisible - at least until a psychiatrist who is good, or luck...
We do not realize how deeply our starting assumptions affect the way we go about looking for and interpreting the data we collect. We should recognize that nonhuman organisms need not meet every new definition of human language, tool use, mind, or co...
What were you going to make for Christmas dinner?” one of my older children asked in a very reasonable tone. I cleared my throat, but couldn’t speak. There was no real explanation for my behavior. I’d been so intent on getting through this firs...
I wonder if I'm being disloyal, if being with Didier means I'm forgetting about Jones. But every time I go in a drain, or past a church, I think of him. Every time I see a can of Coke, I think of Jones. And don't even start me on how I feel when I se...
I do not grieve for him as a wife, as Anne Devereux has grieved for her husband William Herbert. She promised him she would never remarry, she swore she would go to her grave hoping to meet him in heaven. I suppose they were in some sort of love, tho...
In our more arrogant moments, the sin of pride—or superbia, in Augustine's Latin formulation—takes over our personalities and shuts us off from those around us. We become dull to others when all we seek to do is assert how well things are going f...
