No. Absolutely not.' 'Simon,' she said. 'It’s a perfectly fine plan.' 'The plan where you follow Jace and Sebastian off to some unknown dimensional pocket and we use these rings to communicate so those of us over here in the regular dimension of Ea...
I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn’t have to write at all anymore if I didn’t want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I don’t know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, when they’re through blooming, have some sor...
With the ferrule of his walking-stick Denis began to scratch the boar's long bristly back. The animal moved a little so as to bring himself within easier range of the instrument that evoked in him such delicious sensations; then he stood stock still,...
One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you. The Miracles of the Church seem to me not to rest so much upon faces or voices or he...
Alain Badiou was once seated amongst the public in a room where I was delivering a talk, when his cellphone (which, to add insult to injury, was mine -- I had lent it to him) all of a sudden started to ring. Instead of turning it off, he gently inter...
It's unfair." As a rule, life is unfair," I said. Yeah, but I think I did say some awful things." To Dick?" Yeah." I pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road and turned off the ignition. "That's just stupid, that kind of thinking," I said, nai...
Take your clothes off." "What?" "You heard me." Evelyn forced her mouth shut. She looked around the room, buying time. The faded brown curtains hung limply over the windows, not quite touching, and the afternoon light filtered through the gaps, its b...
Though his countenance was solemn, there was a glint of amusement in his eyes. "Major MacKinnon, won't you join us?" "But, my lord, he is clad in outlawed rebel attire. The Dress Act expressly forbids--" "I am not blind, Colonel, and I am familiar wi...
There's always a siren, singing you to shipwreck. Some of us may be more susceptible than others are, but there's always a siren. It may be with us all our lives, or it may be many years or decades before we find it or it finds us. But when it does f...
I know the difference between sadness and depression. Clinical depression has no source from which it springs-it just is. Intractable sadness has nothing to do with synapses, or brain chemistry, or essential salts, it's born of something. It's the pr...
A phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self — a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his co...
If I could fly, life would be amazing. But paraplegic people say the same thing about walking, and I freaking hate walking. Somebody might ask me, “Hey, do you want to go for a walk?” and I’ll reply, “Nope. But I do want to have a seat on a c...
Adam was in the dream, too; he traced the tangled pattern of ink with his finger. He said, "Scio quid hoc est." As he traced it further and further down on the bare skin of Ronan's back, Ronan himself disappeared entirely, and the tattoo got smaller ...
She whimpered into his mouth and clung to his broad shoulders, rubbing her breasts against him to relieve the ache in her suddenly hypersensitive nipples. In answer, he took her deeper and rested more of his weight against her, that thick thigh betwe...
The magic in writing is not so much using your imagination as it is allowing the reader to uses theirs. When I write a novel I’m not going to hand walk you through each scene. Avid readers tend to have very high IQ’s so I’m constantly aware of,...
Yo, beautiful. Come pop this collar off me.” Natalya hissed, “Are you mad?” “What’s she gonna do? Vivisect me? Imprison me? We’ve got a pact to fulfill,remember?” To Dorada, she cried, “Seriously, sweetheart, shake that mummified ass ...
Both of us take a moment to put our thoughts in order. I'm staring down at my glass when the pause in conversation is interrupted. “Come with me, now!” He grabs hold of my drink just as I’m about to take a swig, and puts it back down on the bar...
F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author laughing at his own jokes, but that's not the case in the modern age; now, the exclamation point signifies creative confusion. All it illustrates is th...
I became simply a pair of eyes, staring through my mask at Char. I needed no ears because I was too far off to hear his voice, no words because I was too distant for speech, and no thoughts - those I saved for later. He bent his head. I loved the hai...
One of the greatest myths in the world - & the phrase 'greatest myths' is just a fancy way of saying 'big fat lies' -- is that troublesome things get less & less troublesome if you do them more & more. People say this myth when they are teaching chil...
Until-as often happened during those first months travel, whenever I would feel such happiness-my guilt alarm went off. I heard my ex-husband's voice speaking disdainfully in my ear: So this is what you gave up everything for? This is why you gutted ...
