My mother hasn’t asked the questions that a normal person would ask, and I’m grateful for it. It’s like the world has become so crazy that it makes sense to her now. I turn on the engine and drive us out. ‘Thanks, Mom. For coming to rescue me...
When Alexander the Great visited the philosopher Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for him, Diogenes is said to have replied: ‘Yes, stand a little less between me and the sun.’ It is what every citizen is entitled to ask of his gove...
After some cogitation, it is difficult not to agree with Herman Bondi (1919 - 2005), who in his book 'Relativity and Common Sense' says: ... The surprising thing, surely, is that molecules in a gas behave so much as billiard balls, not that electrons...
I didn't go to bookshops to buy. That's a little bourgeois. I went because they were civilized places. It made me happy there were people who sat down and wrote and wrote and wrote and there were other people who devoted their lives to making those w...
I don't know if you have any idea what a high school in Paris is like in this day and age in the posh neighborhoods—but quite honestly, the slummy banlieues of Marseille have nothing on ours. In fact it may even be worse here, because where you hav...
Astronomy defined our home as a small planet tucked away in one corner of an average galaxy among million; biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God; geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our ...
A soul mates purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life, then intr...
She had always wanted to do every thing, and had made more progress in both drawing and music than many might have done with so little labour as she ever would submit to... She was not much deceived as to her own skill either as an artist or a musici...
It’s not only about sadness. In truth, sadness really has little to do with it. Depression is pain in its purest form and I would do anything to be able to feel an emotion again. Any emotion at all. Pain hurts, but pain that’s so powerful that yo...
The two girls disappeared into the stern cabin once more. Will watched them go, then asked Halt, 'Anything you'd like me to do? Grow a beard? Learn to walk like a rooster?' 'If you could stop asking facetious questions, that'd be a start,' Halt told ...
How joyful to be together, alone as when we first were joined in our little house by the river long ago, except that now we know each other, as we did not then; and now instead of two stories fumbling to meet, we belong to one story that the two, joi...
Weber also saw that a bureaucratic world contained risks. It produced increasingly powerful and autonomous bureaucrats who could be spiritless, driven only by impersonal rules and procedures, and with little regard for the people they were expected t...
Uh, excuse me, sir, I, uh, don't known how to uh, to uh, tell you this, but you were three minutes late. The schedule is a little, uh, bit off." He grinned sheepishly. "That's ridiculous!" murmured the Ticktockman behind his mask. "Check your watch."...
People who take a long view of their lives and careers always seem to make much better decisions about their time and activities than people who give very little thought to the future.
I got a call froma cynical young American journalist...You know the sort. He's lived in the Middle East for a little over five minutes so assumes he knows us natives well. I sip at a skinny mocha frappe while he fires off big important questions abou...
Grimm always used rabbits, on account of a grudge he had with the Easter Bunny. I’d had a pet rabbit when I was little, and the first time I saw an augury I think I managed to throw up and faint at the same time. After that, Grimm had it done witho...
You are not in Disneyland,” he said. “The little people you see running around over here are not Mouseketeers. Some of them are friendly, and some of them have a strong desire to kill you. If you remember that, and manage to kill them before they...
Oh, don’t worry, I am perfectly aware of the fantasy involved here, but what we want is almost never exempt from the impossible. That barrier has very little meaning for me these days. Given what’s happened, is just a blind spot that dissolves if...
Isn't it a mercy that we never get cured of being expectant? It makes life so bearable. However regularly we are disappointed and nothing whatever happens, after the first blow has fallen, after the first catch of the breath, the first gulp of misery...
When she set Shane’s glass of Coke down in front of him, she did it with probably a little too much emphasis; he glanced up at her with a question-mark expression.[...] ‘‘What?’’ Shane asked her, and took a drink. ‘‘Did I forget to say ...
Louis-Cesare and Ray were in trouble. I could tell because I could see them, not clearly, but in fits and starts, little glimmers like a couple of ghosts, if ghosts made "oh shit" faces on the one hand agitated French gestures on the other. And that ...
