Love was more than just a fleeting desire, or a brief glimpse into a fairy tale, or a flash of playful flirtation in her beautiful hazel eyes. It was more than infatuation with a person’s best qualities, or reluctant acceptance of their less appeal...
America at a turning point! But in 1813 the United States and Nathan Jeffries may lose everything; blockaded, imprisoned, raided, massacred, Americans are feeling the wrath of British forces on land and sea. Nathan Jeffries, son of Captain William Je...
It’s like my entire conscious state has been reduced to this toxic blend of hope and uncertainty. I hate that I have to act cool and almost pretend I don’t like him when in fact I do, because, God forbid, I might come across as desperate for affe...
Nearly every "serious" anarchist writer in recent years has tried to distance anarchism from chaos. Yet for most ordinary people, chaos and anarchy are forever linked. The connection between chaos and anarchism should be rethought and embraced, inste...
The genius craves inspiration: she craves altered states and fresh perceptions. She will have them either through evolving closer to the divine or through devolving lower into the world. This is how some people with great genius come to die of drug a...
I cannot tell you how many quiet mornings I have spent sitting around hotel rooms and furnished apartments in the United States and Mexico, smoking cigarettes, plunking the guitar, and watching --telling myself, "Well, at least I don't have a day job...
During the earliest attacks of Fear and intense unreality, I sometimes uttered these unconscious and shocking words: 'I should prefer to escape into madness to avoid this consuming fear.' Alas, I did not know what I was saying. In my ignorance I beli...
You can see it as you walk through the street: people who have never recovered. You can see it on their face, in their posturing. It needn’t be that way. We really are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers … we really are obliged to put out our ...
Not only are animals unable to avail themselves of language to assert their own rights, but many fewer humans have a clear sense of kinship with animals than have a clear sense of kinship with other humans. Among beings with subjective states of awar...
The Jardin Massey looked dismal today, rain lashed and deserted. She watched a bedraggled pigeon, feathers puffed out, sheltering beneath a branch.She'd never made a will, never considered whether she'd rather her body was buried or burnt to grey pow...
Just because you are alive, doesn’t mean that life is going to hand you everything. If you keep believing life will somehow automatically improve on its own, then you’re going to waste many years of your life in a state of disappointment. Life is...
Being in grief, it turns out, is not unlike being in love. In both states, the imagination's entirely occupied with one person. The beloved dwells at the heart of the world, and becomes a Rome: the roads of feeling all lead to him, all proceed from h...
I have always had a special affinity for libraries and librarians, for the most obvious reasons. I love books. (One of my first Jobs was shelving books at a branch of the Chicago Public Library.) Libraries are a pillar of any society. I believe our l...
The modern writers who have suggested, in a more or less open manner, that the family is a bad institution, have generally confined themselves to suggesting, with much sharpness, bitterness, or pathos, that perhaps the family is not always very conge...
Even the most blatant assholes seemed to function in a state of grace when confronted with the brutal loss of a loved one. They moved through the world differently than other people. When they looked at you, you had the feeling that they were really ...
For the information of these “friends” who consider themselves called to defend against us the role of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution, we give warning that our book teaches not how to love a victorious revolution after the event, in the...
How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? What have you done, oh, Father, What have you done with ...
To live in any true sense of the word is to reject others; to accept them, one must be able to renounce, to do oneself violence, to act against one's own nature, to weaken oneself; we conceive freedom only for ourselves - we extend it to our neighbou...
Though Jonah felt transfixed inside his own childhood, no one else saw him as a child. He was already over the hump of middle age, heading rapidly toward those year that no one like to speak of. The best parts had already passed for people Jonah's ag...
Ash and Puck shared a brief glance, and then Ash pushed himself off the wall to stand beside me. “Lead the way,” he said, nodding into the darkness. “We’ll be right behind you.” “For the record,” Grimalkin stated as we ventured, single ...
Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a n...
