It was only a couple of chickens. Real chickens. The kind that walk around clucking and pecking. Which is what they were doing. Only no one else seemed to care, or even notice. This is normal? Obviously I had a little hiccup reading my notecards. Und...
Glitter and streamers of light swirled around us, and a chorus of tiny voices sang out a single note. I winced, knowing there was only one person who thought a normal entrance, like walking through a door, wasn’t good enough for her; she had to ann...
Everyone was eating, talking softly, glancing at me, hugging me, eating. It was as if someone had turned the volume down. Everything looked normal, but the sound was muted. Death did this, set all this weirdness in motion, made people appear out of n...
The teachings of a religion should influence the personality and daily conduct of each believer. Thus, each person's conduct will normally be a reflection, to a greater or lesser degree, of that one's religious background. What effect does your relig...
It is quite normal to fear what one most desires. We desire to transcend the Story of the World that has come to enslave us, that indeed is killing the planet. We fear what the end of that story will bring: the demise of much that is familiar. Fear i...
Women, the most beautiful things in the world,” answers the model. As if it’s the only thing worth painting, as if everyone should aspire to it. Normally coming from a guy that answer would sound so incredibly skeezy—a greasy, obvious pick-up l...
Fame is a perverse deformity, an ego swelling as ludicrous as an extra organ, and the people that have it, for a huge part, are willfully and deliberately fucked-up past the point of ever having anything sweet or human or normal about themselves ever...
Bliss, I don’t normally do things like that. But I was second-guessing everything about coming here, and you were everything I needed. I don’t know how many times I’ve stopped myself from coming over here and knocking on your door. And yes, see...
Your... Your aura. It's... amazing. It's shining. I mean, it always shines, but today... Well I've never seen anything like it. I didn't expect that after everything that happened.' I shifted around uncomfortably. If I lit up around Dimitri normally,...
Normally I give permission to take my daughter for a walk after only the building of a wall and a stone pathway.' He smiled. 'For future reference.' 'But, Pan, I knew after the first week that a walk was not the only thing I would request,' the Pigeo...
Our lives are part of a unique adventure... Nevertheless, most of us think the world is 'normal' and are constantly hunting for something abnormal--like angels or Martians. But that is just because we don't realize the world is a mystery. As for myse...
Indeed, girls can be so in need of social approval that they confuse harassment for acceptance--thinking that any attention is better than none. Since many girls as well as boys buy the idea that sexual aggression and exploitation is normal masculine...
He said he’d heard the sound of one hand clapping. He said, once his mind took in the wondrous no-sound of holy oneness, the empty echo of eternal bliss, he was never the same. He could hear it still, he said, resounding in the ether and tickling t...
Learning to be aware of what you unconsciously know may depend on a line of focused effort and specialized knowledge and even some measure of aptitude, but actually learning it may be effortless, automatic, and require very little of what we normally...
Sin embargo, notábanse en esta gente una gentileza y un infantilismo extraordinarios, una incapacidad especial para el engaño, una disposición incansable para ayudarse y compadecerse mutuamente, que merecían con frecuencia tanto respeto y un apre...
It pleased Aliena that they were all together: she and Jack and their children, and Jack's mother, and Aliena's brother, and Martha. It was quite like an ordinary family, and Aliena could almost forget that her father had died in a dungeon, and she w...
There is no evidence that we've been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite of...
Normally, anything done in the name of 'the kids' strikes me as either slightly sentimental or faintly sinister—that redolence of moral blackmail that adheres to certain charitable appeals and certain kinds of politician. (Not for nothing is baby-k...
I like your mama,' Trena tells me. 'She seems like good people.' 'Smile!' my mom calls to me from across the room, and I look at her and smile. Because she is good people. And she means well, even if she does drive me crazy.
(On having being just proposed to) 'Have you been thinking of this for long?' she managed jerkily, praying for the shock to recede so that she could behave a little more normally. 'Let's say it crept up on me,' he suggested lightly. That didn't sound...
When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing yo...
