The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can't all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It's a possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right? Well, the way to winnow through all the differing c...
It necessarily follows that chance alone is at the source of every innovation, and of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biolo...
If I kissed her now, one of two things would happen. We’d either get naked right here on the beach and probably get arrested, or I’d somehow manage to get us up the hill to my house, and then we’d get naked. But kissing her once, then letting h...
And, thinking of this judgment I would no longer be able to change, I suddenly felt a kind of relief, as if peace could come to me only after the moment when there would be nothing to add and nothing to remove in that arbitrary ledger of misunderstan...
It’s the way he had a cup of tea waiting for me when I woke up. It’s the way he turned on his laptop especially for me to look up all my Internet horoscopes and helped me choose the best one. He knows all the crappy, embarrassing bits about me th...
Since only a narrow range of the allowed values for, say, the fine structure constant will permit observers to exist in the Universe, we must find ourselves in the narrow range of possibilities which permit them, no matter how improbable they are. We...
You have chastised me, demeaned me and dismantled me, before bringing me back to life. Who would have thought all of this was possible in a grotty cubicle of the men’s room? You hold me there for some time whilst we both catch our breath. Tentative...
Collins and Morales represent a segment of society which, if attacked with the weapons society sanctions, one finds buffered by innumerable layers of law, bureaucracy, lies, evasions. They rest secure within their palaces, confident that they possess...
For me, walking in a hard Dakota wind can be like staring at the ocean: humbled before its immensity, I also have a sense of being at home on this planet, my blood so like the sea in chemical composition, my every cell partaking of air. I live about ...
He wondered if today was that day, if he’d wake up different, wake up someone else who remembered him fondly. A new Doctor. He wondered if he’d approve. Would he be more gentle? That might not be so bad. More vengeful? He hoped not. Maybe he’d ...
I am not an ape, I am a man. The world has been created by God. Man has been created by God. It is not possible for man to understand God - God understands God. Man is God and therefore understands God. I am God. I am a man. I am good and not a beast...
She had just realized there were two things that prevent us from achieving our dreams: believing them to be impossible or seeing those dreams made possible by some sudden turn of the wheel of fortune, when you least expected it. For at that moment, a...
Because he sounded so lost-the Eric I knew had never been one to do anything other than assume others should serve him-I patted around under the covers for his hand. When I found it, I slid my own over it. His palm was turned up to meet my palm, and ...
Nicholas Benedict did have an exceptional gift for knowing things (more exceptional, in fact, than most adults would have thought possible), and yet not even he could know that this next chapter was to be the most unusual-and most important-of his en...
William: My brother has an appreciation of art, so I imagine the woman he chooses must be beautiful beyond the pale. Once he outgrows his current predilection with painting and accepts his family responsibilities, he'll need a wife who can move throu...
I wanted to tell her everything, maybe if I'd been able to, we could have lived differently, maybe I'd be there with you now instead of here. Maybe... if I'd said, 'I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything,' maybe that ...
I want to write a book called, “Son, I’m dying,” where I visualize the day my estranged dad calls me out of the blue to tell me he is dying, and in as many ways as possible I’ll offer up various responses to that.
Planning is worrying, only in a productive, proactive form. Worry has to be a large element of planning, or else how could you project different possible scenarios, situations, outcomes, and probabilities, and then plot a course of action? A worry-fr...
As Ernest Becker observes in The Denial of Death, the very thought of disobeying authority appears to awaken the anxiety connected with the possible loss, during infancy, of parental love, respect or support. The unexamined beliefs and experiences th...
Never let failure discourage you. Every time you get to the base of a mountain (literal or metaphorical), you're presented with a new opportunity to challenge yourself, to push your limits beyond what you thought possible, to learn from climbers on t...
Women always said things like that, and it made him crazy. It's as if every conversation with a woman was a test, and men always failed it, because they always lacked the key to the code and so they never quite understood what the conversation was re...
