We fail so easily to see the difference between fear of the unknown and respect for the unknown, thinking that those who do not hasten in with bright lights and knives are deterred by a holy and superstitious fear. Respect for the unknown is the atti...
Thought and science are therefore raising problems which their terms of study can never answer, many of which are doubtless problems only for thought. The trisection of an angle is similarly an insoluble problem only for compass and straight-edge con...
The day after we returned from Iorn Fist I woke up and I want either one of them anymore. Somewhere in between a girl I thought was long dead and a woman that was too blood thirsty for me to particularly like. But I thought about all that had happene...
If you are one of earth’s inhabitants, how blest your father, and your gentle mother, blest all your kin. I know what happiness must send the warm tears to their eyes, each time they see their wondrous child go to the dancing! But one man’s desti...
Rabe'a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seen running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, 'I am going to t...
Extreme civilization robs crime of its frightful poetry, and prevents the writer from restoring it. That would be too dreadful, say those good souls who want everything to be prettified, even the horrible. In the name of philanthropy, imbecile crimin...
If writers only dared to dare, a Suetonius or a Tacitus of the Novel could exist, for the Novel is essentially the history of manners, turned into a story and a play, as is History itself often enough. And there is no other difference than this: that...
Now, this is where I draw the line! It's bad enough everybody in town's going to be thinkin' I'm sleeping with a depressed, lice-ridden, hemorrhoidal foreigner who likes to be tied up and might be pregnant, although-since she's just about cornered th...
Bathsheba looked at Benedict. "You never told me they were matchmaking." "He didn't notice!" said his father before Benedict could answer. "He didn't notice handsome young misses of unexceptionable family. He didn't notice beautiful heiresses. We tri...
We stand hand-clasped, our faces quite blank, as if this were not a nightmare that tells me, as clearly as if it were written in letters of fire, what ending a girl may expect if she defies the rules of men and thinks she can make her own destiny. I ...
A grey-suited figure with badly-scuffed shoes was squatted over a woman’s body, obscuring her face and upper torso. A loose, white dress; torn, now mostly red. A pattern of rose petals, drenched in blood. One of her sandals was missing, scarlet str...
Frustration filled his features. "Rose I've done a lot of bad things, most of which I can never fix or find redemption for. My only choice now, if I want to reclaim my life, is to go forward, stopping evil and doing what's right. And what is NOT righ...
My mind begs for you in the soft, secret, silent places of the night... I thirst for you and without you my soul is a desert. I thought when I first met you, first saw you, that I loved you more than any woman had ever loved a man, but now I know the...
Lysistrata: Oh, Calonicé, my heart is on fire; I blush for our sex. Men will have it we are tricky and sly... Calonicé: And they are quite right, upon my word! Lysistrata: Yet, look you, when the women are summoned to meet for a matter of the last ...
Let us forget that we are Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Presbyterians, or Free-thinkers, and remember only that we are men and women. After all, man and woman are the highest possible titles. All other names belittle us, and show that we have, to ...
The very next day, we were told that Abigail had had a massive stroke. She was alive, but the woman we had known had vanished. She did not know where she was or who she was. The alarm clock had gone off. The very old languish and die. We know that, b...
You know, if you ain't poor, you might think it's the folks in them big ole fine brick churches that's doin all the carin and the prayin. I wish you coulda seen all them little circles a'homeless folks with their heads bowed and their eyes closed, wh...
A gray V-neck T-shirt hugged his wide shoulders and broad chest, then hung loose over his tight abdomen. a pair of worn Levi's lovingly cupped his generous package, embraced long legs, and broke across the tops of well-worn cowboy boots. Jackson had ...
Then one woman looked directly at her husband. "Is our place gone?" "I'm afraid so, girl," he said. "There isn't much left up there. But we're alive. We're all lucky to be alive. We'd have been dead if we'd stayed up above." "Oh, what a mercy we didn...
It may well have been, too, that the smiling moderation with which she faced and answered these blasphemies, that this tender and hypocritical rebuke appeared to her frank and generous nature as a particularly shameful and seductive form of that crim...
To find not only that this bedlam of color was true but that the pictures were pale and inaccurate translations, was to me startling. I can't even imagine the forest colors when I am not seeing them. I wondered whether constant association could caus...
