Observing others go through them, he used to admire midlife crises, the courage and shamelessness and existential daring of them, but after he'd watched his own wife, a respectable nursery school teacher, produce and star in a full-blown one of her o...
How many rooms are there in the chambers of your heart? How many rooms full of memories can you describe like the one I’m going to tell you about. You know how you left him don’t you? The man you were so in love with once. Bing Cherry Silk. Anoth...
He's changing. Every day more remote, protected, distant. He builds fests now for the soulmate he hasn't found, bricking wall and maze and mountain fortress, dares her to find him at the hidden center of them all Here's an A in self-protection from t...
It's not being a woman I mind so much," she said slowly. "'Tis the way men seem to always order my life." She leaned earnestly toward him. "Your hand, Papa, has wielded a sword and cradled a child and held power over hundreds of men." She held up her...
Tomorrow you may bring about the destruction of your world. Tomorrow you may sing in Paradise above the smoking ruins of your world-cities. But tonight I would like to think of one man, a lone individual, a man without name or country, a man whom I r...
No relationship is without its difficulties and this is certainly true when one or both of the persons involved has an autistic spectrum disorder. Even so, I believe what is truly essential to the success of any relationship is not so much compatibil...
In case you haven't noticed, they're moving a lot faster. I don't know about the laws of physics on your planet, but where I come from an object moving at subclass speed can't catch up to one running at starclass. But if you know something about turb...
Now that the house was securely hidden, the fact that he was holed up with Havily sent a wave of heat over his body. I'm not going to be able to keep away from you, he said. Tell me you know that. Tell me you understand. Her eyelids fell to half-mast...
-The reason we race isn't so much to beat each other but to be with each other. -The Hopis consider running a form of prayer; they offer every step as a sacrifice to a loved one, and in return ask the Great Spirit to match their strength with some of...
Homo sapiens is one of the few species on earth that care if they’re seen having sex. The impala is unconcerned. The dingo roundly flaunts it. A masturbating chimpanzee will stare straight at you. To any creature other than you and I and 6 billion ...
Do all people have that? A face, a phrase, a landscape, an air bubble from the past suddenly floating up as if released by the head warden's child from a cell in the brain while the mind is at work on some totally different matter? Something of the s...
How does it feel, anyway?" How does what feel?" When you take one of those books?" At that moment, she chose to keep still. If he wants an answer, he'd have to come back, and he did. "Well?" he asked, but again, it was the boy who replied, before Lie...
Someone, somewhere, needs to take courage to break the cycle of violence. Forgiveness is superior to justice. Being kind and compassionate to those who are good to you is easy. True forgiveness and compassion come only when one is able to forgive eve...
You don’t like my restaurant, Miss Connor?” “I couldn’t say since the waiting list to get in is six months long.” One side of his mouth curved up. “This is true.” His finger lingered, and I tried to swallow the nervous lump in my throat...
The symptomatology of PTSD. In PTSD a traumatic event is not remembered and relegated to one's past in the same way as other life events. Trauma continues to intrude with visual, auditory, and/or other somatic reality on the lives of its victims. Aga...
They're strange, those wars. Full of blood and violence - but full of stories that are equally difficult to fanthom. "It's true," people will mutter. "I don't care if you don't belive me. It was the fox who saved my life" or, "They died on either sid...
One of his private vanities was that all the garbage sorting had endowed his hands with killing strength—that he could chop a brick in half like Bruce Lee. “So let’s get a brick,” replied a girl with whom he had once, injudiciously, shared th...
In places where government priorities and market imperatives create a world so capricious that to help a neighbor is to risk your ability to feed your family, and sometimes even your own liberty, the idea of the mutually supportive poor community is ...
How did these organs of plant sex manage to get themselves cross-wired with human ideas of value and status and Eros? And what might our ancient attraction for flowers have to teach us about the deeper mysteries of beauty - what one poet has called "...
Everyone worked day and night, Monday through Saturday. Oppenheimer insisted people take Sundays off to rest and recharge. Scientists fished for trout in nearby streams, or climbed mountains and discussed physics while watching the sunrise. "This is ...
They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Thainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was c...
