Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast. How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If eq...
I had a book of Bible stories when I was a kid. There was a picture I'd look at twenty times every day: Jacob wrestles with the angel. I don't really remember the story, or why the wrestling --just the picture. Jacob is young and very strong. The ang...
Benjamin and I sat in the middle of one of the large canoes with our grandmother in the stern, directing us past shoals and through rapids and into magnificent stretches of water. One day the clouds hung low and light rain freckled the slate-grey wat...
...some have asked me what understanding of Nature one shapes from so strange a year? I would answer that one's first appreciation is a sense that creation is still going on, that the creative forces are as great and as active to-day as they have eve...
Finally Exi spoke. "There are some important things to remember always, no matter how hard life presses at you. One of these things is that wherever you are, and no matter for how long, there must be a home to hold you. You cannot know who you are un...
One day at Fenner's (the university cricket ground at Cambridge), just before the last war, G. H. Hardy and I were talking about Einstein. Hardy had met him several times, and I had recently returned from visiting him. Hardy was saying that in his li...
In America, doctors, lawyers, generals, actors, television people and politicians are admired and rewarded. Not teachers. Teaching is the downstairs maid of professions. Teachers are told to use the service door or go round the back. They are congrat...
If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing it. Becoming: an agony without an ending.The older I grow, the less I enjoy performing my little Hamlet. The desire to die was my one and only concern; to i...
Fuchs: There's something wrong with Blair. He's locked himself in his room and he won't answer the door, so I took one of his notebooks from the lab. MacReady: Yeah? Fuchs: Listen: "It could have imitated a million life-forms on a million planets. It...
He updated his report, doing his best to tune out the two men who staggered into the police station, dragging each other. "I want you to arrest this idiot bastard," the taller one shouted, face contorted with rage. "He shit on my front porch!" Your d...
Two years ago, I was a twenty-nine year old secretary. Now I am a thirty-one year old writer. I get paid very well to sit around in my pajamas and type on my ridiculously fancy iMac, unless I'd rather take a nap. Feel free to hate me -- I certainly w...
They say time is money, but that's not true. Time is life. And if I want the fullest life, I need to find fullest time... the busyness of your life leaving little room for the source of your life... God gives us time. And who has time for God? Which ...
A mother is the person who takes care of you when you're sick. The one who holds you when you're afraid. The one who follows the bus to school on the first day to make sure you made it okay. I have only one mother, Nana; he just happens to be my fath...
Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz a...
He put one hand lightly on the back of her neck and simultaneously she placed one hand lightly on his hip, and they kissed in the street as all around them people hurried home in the summer light, and it was the sweetest kiss that either of them woul...
The Rapist: I've seen me a lot of weird shit in my day, but I ain't never seen a one-legged stripper. I seen me a stripper with one breast. And I seen me a stripper with twelve toes. I've even seen me a stripper with no brains at all, but I ain't nev...
From time to time I once wondered how one wanders from time to time And think up the paradox line Speak of Epoch's crime Oh I lied, it hasn't happened yet But bet you better believe it's such a habit that I just said that in a past mindset
Why did they go away, do you think? If there ever were such things." "Who knows? Times change. Would you call this age a good one for unicorns?" "No, but I wonder if any man before us ever thought his time a good time for unicorns.
Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now...
He is deemed an inappropriate guardian, whereas my parents who neglected us every day of our waking lives were always deemed appropriate guardians on account of the DNA issue. No one wants to separate children from their parents, even when their pare...
Scars exist to show that I existed. I myself don’t have any scars, but every single one of my friends has a healed up knife wound deep in their back.
