Standard languages are inventions, most of them confined to a recent period in human history. They are codes that give access not to clear thinking and basic decency but to the structured parts of our lives such as job interviews, political speeches,...
As much as I think about sex, I can only with extreme difficulty conceive of myself actually performing the act. And here's another thing I wonder about. How could you ever look a girl in the eye after you've had your winkie up her wendell? I mean, d...
On Alex Rodriguez's difficulty performing in clutch situations, Joe Torre writes, "In key situations, he can't get himself to concern himself with getting the job done instead of how it looks. There's a certain freefall you go through when you commit...
Oh, do you have A Tale of Two Cities?" "That silly thing? Men going around getting their heads chopped off for love? Ridiculus." Will unpeeled himself from the door and made his way toward Tessa where she stood by the bookshelves. He gestured expansi...
She looked up from closing it to find Jace watching her through hooded eyes. “And one last thing,” he said. He reached over and pulled the sparking pins out of her hair, so that it fell in warm heavy curls down her neck. The sensation of hair tic...
We both disliked rude rickshwalas, shepu bhaji in any form, group photographs at weddings, lizards, tea that has gone cold, the habit of taking newspaper to the toilet, kissing a boy who'd just smoked a cigarette et cetra. Another list. The things we...
Jace's eyes sparkled, but he said calmly, "Not at all. the Silent Brothers can help her retrieve her memories." "You hate the Silent Brothers," protested Isabelle. "I don't hate them," said Jace candidly."I'm afraid of them. It's not the same thing."...
Restoring order of my personal universe suddenly seemed imperative, as I refolded my T-shirts, stuffed the toes of my shoes with tissue paper, and arranged all the bills in my secret stash box facing the same way, instead of tossed in sloppy and wild...
You never could tell when someone would stop growing old in Neverland. For Tik Tok, it had been after wrinkles had walked long deep tracks across his face, but for many people, it was much younger. Some people said it occurred when the most important...
I felt like he was hiding so much, that I wasn't even seeing the real Garret at all, and the more I hung out with him, the more I would learn. Also being with him did strange, twisty things to my insides. My dragon instincts did not approve; they sti...
There is no limit as to what we can learn. Through study, we can learn from the past. Experience can empower us to handle the present. For those who desire to learn of the future, dreams hold a subtle key. Not all things we see, as we sleep, should b...
But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same...
In a way, losing hope and losing importance are the same thing. It is that youthful vibrance, that eternal longing and believing, that makes youth so important--if you grow old and lose that without finding another way to be important, you will slip ...
For the first time in my life I actually feel sorry for Carol. I'm only seventeen years old, and I already know something she doesn't know: I know that life isn't life if you just float through it. I know that the whole point- the only point- is to f...
Let's commit ourselves to act like men - not like the men of our day who are preoccupied with money, with pleasure, with human power, and with selfish and merely temporal concerns. Let us act like men of God. And let's not attempt to be strong in our...
I thought carefully as I watched Eyuran treat Uncle Orewen’s wounds. There is no one in their right mind who would assault a Danna, simply because the enemy of an individual becomes the enemy of the whole kennar. Kennar are usually related to each ...
You ever notice how long it takes for things to happen when you know they're supposed to happen? My fake Walkman has a built-in alarm, and I set it for two in the morning and wear the headphones to bed, but before you can wake up you have to fall asl...
Clearly there are common sense things we can do to help children to have better lives and keep them from becoming so despondent that their only perceived solution is to kill themselves or others. How oblivious do we have to be to the inner turmoil of...
Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being t...
She couldn't take her eyes off him. He had sandy-blond hair and piercingly green eyes. Today he wore a deep-red T-shirt with the word BOUNCER printed across the back. The material pulled tightly over his muscular chest. He was a specimen. But the mos...
In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small). By reading any text of popular science we quickly rega...
