He was a master in the art of spreading boredom and playing the clumsy fool-though never so egregiously that people might enjoy making fun of him or use him as the butt of some crude practical joke inside the guild. He succeeded in being considered t...
Point being that you don't have to get too worked up about us, dear educated minds. You don't have to think of us as real girls, real flesh and blood, real pain, real injustice. That might be too upsetting. Just discard the sordid part. Consider us p...
This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is ...
I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your eyes also. Is love content with that? You do them, indeed, because they are His wil...
He might have run off then, and thus avoided a great many adventures to come, but the girl cried, “Wait!” and he turned to face her. “Please,” she implored from the window. “Don’t go. Come with us. I promise you won’t regret it.” For ...
Every nation ends and every empire. Every baby born was going to die, given enough time. If being fated for destruction were enough to take the joy out of things, we’d slaughter children fresh from the womb. But we don’t. We wrap them in warm clo...
He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest's eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent e...
You're wrong Heinrich. While it might seem easy to believe, you and I aren't actually the same. You've been fighting someone else's war, you've been obeying orders, you've been carrying out a part in his plan. You've served other people all your life...
here's the thing about friends, I mean REAL friends: You can't just put up a poster at school and advertise for somebody and then hope you find the perfect one. It might work, I guess, but you'd look so pathetic and desperate that no one would want t...
Once I heard my mother say that each of us lives in a separate universe, one we have dreamed into being. We love pople when their dream coincides with ours, the way two cutout designs laid one on top of the other might match. But dream worlds are not...
Right, what's there possibly to worry about?" she said. "Just some surgery in the garage with a drunk doctor." Little miss," said Doc, pointing a finger at Cass. "I'm drinking. I'm not drunk. There's a difference." He took another sip from his cup. "...
We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again, and that sense of fear, of furtive unrest, struggling at length to blind unreasoning panic - now m...
Condoms seemed to her inherently wicked. But they were also inherently funny. They were like rubber gloves with only one finger, and every time she saw one she had to be severe with herself or she’d get the giggles, a terrifying thought because the...
I draw in a ragged breath, the kind you take when the pain is too deep to cry, when you can't cry because all you are is pain, and if you let some of it out, you might cease to exist. I want to do something to make this better, even though I know tha...
I'm so tired. Once, I wanted to watch the floods coming into a canyon, to stand on the edge and see it happen, on ground that was safe but shaking. I thought, Now I think it might be a terrifying, bright relief to stand on the canyon floor and see th...
You may get me to say the word, but know this, you will never truly own me. That right belongs to my real master. You may take his symbol off my hip, but there will always be a scar that reminds us both what was there. And you might take his collar o...
He wanted to hide by shrinking past zero, through the dot at the end of himself, to a negative size, into an otherworld, where he would find a place— in an enormous city, too large to know itself, or some slowly developing suburb— to be alone and...
Words were the bane of her existence. She drowned in them when all she wanted was silence, only to have them recede when one desperately-sought phrase would be the key to her salvation. Most things were like that: excess in times of abundance, and sh...
Night is irregular. What is not done in the daytime becomes possible at night: murder and sex and thought. Simple men are driven to early beds by tomorrow's daytime demands and by fear of the dark, and never dream of the irregular world outside. And ...
Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in hims...
Last year I built a Courage Machine, but I thought it might be noisy and was too afraid to turn it on. So I coated it with glue, covered it with cat hair, mounted it on my wall, and started claiming it was an exotic animal I killed on a Safari in Afr...
