You sneaked into my cabin?” Annabeth rolled her eyes. “Percy, you’ll be seventeen in two months. You can’t seriously be worried about getting in trouble with Coach Hedge.” “Uh, have you seen his baseball bat?” “Besides, Seaweed Brain,...
After a few minutes Erica pulled back slightly. “I thought you were supposed to be trying to seduce me?” “Seems like you needed this more.” “You don’t want to…” “Erica, I always want you, but I still want to be here with you even if...
We do not need definite beliefs because their objects are necessarily true. We need them because they enable us to stand on steady spots from which the truth may be glimpsed. And not simply glimpsed—because certainly revelation is available outside...
I've got a few ideas," (Amy) admitted. "But I don't know where we're going in the long term. I mean - have you ever thought about what this ultimate treasure could be?" "Something cool." (Dan) "Oh, that's real helpful. I mean, what could make somebod...
The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon. Our government's got a war on drugs....But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of...
There’s an organic grocery store just off the highway exit. I can’t remember the last time I went shopping for food.” A smile glittered in his eyes. “I might have gone overboard.” I walked into the kitchen, with gleaming stainless-steel app...
What do I miss, as a human being, if I have never heard of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? The answer is: Nothing. And what do I miss by not knowing Shakespeare? Unless I get my understanding from another source, I simply miss my life. Shall we tel...
The moments of silence are gone. We run from them into the rush of unimportant things, so filled is the quiet with the painful whispers of all that goes unspoken. Busy-ness is our drug of choice, numbing our minds just enough to keep us from dwelling...
The quintessential emblem of religion and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core is the sacrifice of a child by a parent. Almost all religious faiths incorporate the myth of such a sacrifice, and some have actually m...
His mouth was a little too wide and snaked from corner to corner. His nose had been broken a few times, and when you looked at him straight on like I was doing as I stared at him across the circle bar, you could really tell. But his eyes were beautif...
The the uncertainty was dispelled and the melancholy lifted as he saw a familiar stocky figure moving near one of the tents. "Halt!" he cried out gladly, and a slight pressure with his knees set Tug galloping through the deserted Gathering site. The ...
Everybody in!" I said. Which was when we discovered the final problem. Little Echos aren't designed to hold six, count them six, larger-than-average-sized children. And their wings. And a dog. "This is like a clown car," Total grumbled front my lap i...
So they spread the paintings on the lawn, and the boy explained each of them. "This is the school, and this is the playground, and these are my friends." He stared at the paintings for a long time and then shook his head in discouragement. "In my min...
Henceforth the crisis of urbanism is all the more concretely a social and political one, even though today no force born of traditional politics is any longer capable of dealing with it. Medico-sociological banalities on the 'pathology of housing pro...
One by one the angels had come to the top of Har Megiddo where I sat, holding her body close to mine after she'd died. I'd fought alongside them in battle, but up close, when they stood quietly watching us, they looked as beautiful as they looked unr...
I blame Chennai. Pointless neighbourhood gossip travels faster than tsunami alerts around here. I know that aunties are a universal problem but this city is particularly aunty dominated. And by that, I mean, even many of our twenty-somethings act lik...
In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains—flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, cr...
Edgar, do you actually think that how long a person grieves is a measure of how much they loved someone? There's no rule book that says how to do this." She laughed, bitterly. "Wouldn't that be great? No decisions to make. Everything laid right out f...
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date: Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines, And too often is his gold complex...
It's in the morning, for most of us. It's that time, those few seconds when we're coming out of sleep but we're not really awake yet. For those few seconds we're something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep ...
A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze. He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure--as if it mattered. It seemed to him now that such thoughts were mean, unworthy of what his life had been. Dim presences gathered a...
