Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On t...
Perhaps talk of counters turned the boy’s thoughts to his father’s glove shop. His father would have accounted for all his transactions using the tokens. They were hard and round and very thin, made of copper or brass. There were counters for one...
Indeed, four men like them, four men devoted to each other from their money to their lives, four men always supporting each other, never retreating, performing singly or together the resolutions they had made in common; four arms threatening the four...
And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and I knew writing- even writing badly- had peeled away ...
I wish I could tell you that through the tragedy I mined some undiscovered, life-altering absolute that I could pass on to you. I didn't. The clichés apply - people are what count, life is precious, materialism is overrated, the little things matter...
I wish i could tell you that through the tragedy i mined some undiscovered, life-altering absolute that i could pass on to you.I didn't.The cliches apply-people are what count,life is precious,materialism is over rated, and the little things matter,l...
Once upon a time, there was a naïve and innocent girl who thought she could tame the beast and live happily ever after. But the beast did not want to be tamed, for he was a beast and beasts care not for such things, and the girl died along with her ...
I put my office right in the middle of the death they threaten us with. [...] here I sit, every day, hanging over all this wasted nothing. I will never forget what the world could be, should my vigilance never fail. And more than that, I will never f...
I live 30 times faster and more intensely than most people, so every year is a whole generation for me. I’d like my combo meal with a side of long white beard, and I’d like it to go. Now, damnit! Fast food simply isn’t fast enough for me. I’m...
We listened, as all boys in their better moods will listen (ay, and men too for the matter of that), to a man whom we felt to be, with all his heart and soul and strength, striving against whatever was mean and unmanly and unrighteous in our little w...
She hesitated, wiping her hands off on her apron. “I’m not sure if I’ll be here when you get back. This place is a little—it’s a little much for me.” She didn’t have to tell him how it was. He had lived here for years, in a house that w...
The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and life-giving. It is an immense desert place where man is never lonely, for he senses the weaving of Creation on every hand. It is the physical embodiment of...
The Talmud tells a story about a great Rabbi who is dying, he has become a , but he cannot die because outside all his students are praying for him to live and this is distracting to his soul. His maidservant climbs to the roof of the hut where the R...
I remained a socialist for several years, even after my rejection of Marxism; and if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still. For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple, an...
Moses had come to know God as Jehovah-shalom, the God of all peace. This is the deepest need of the human heart—to be at peace with God and with oneself. The proof that his heart was at peace was that it was filled with praise…not necessarily for...
I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, then do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, th...
Rationality or consciousness is itself a ratio or proportion among the sensuous components of experience, and is not something added to such sense experience. Subrational beings have no means of achieving such a ratio or proportion in their sense liv...
What are Christians known for? Outsiders think our moralizing, our condemnations, and our attempts to draw boundaries around everything. Even if these standards are accurate and biblical, they seem to be all we have to offer. And our lives are a poor...
Some nonreligious people are disgruntled by the word "faith," feeling that it has no connection to them. But we all have faith. Broadly speaking, "faith" does not apply only to belief in the supernatural. We have faith in our life, for example, belie...
It is significant comment on the victory of science over magic that were someone to say ‘if I put this pill in your beer it will explode,’ we might believe them; but were they to cry ‘if I pronounce this spell over your beer it will go flat,’...
..."Are you okay?" he says, still looking at me, and I feel my smile slip, fade, and the silence that falls over us then is so total I can’t hear anything, not the rush-hiss of my heart pounding in my chest, not the sounds all around us; insects, w...
