The ascendancy over men's minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised, is half-mystical in basis. The intoxication, at onc...
I've always told people that for each person there is a sentence--a series of words--which has the power to destroy him. When Fat told me about Leon Stone I realized (this came years after the first realization) that another sentence exists, another ...
For the Jesus Revolutionaries, the answer was clear: Jesus would not be out waging "preventative" wars. Jesus would not be withholding medicine from people who could not afford it. Jesus would not cast stones at people of races, sexual orientatons, o...
He knows different now. It's the living that chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives. Thomas More had spread the...
Wherever his gaze touched her, she felt as if flames licked at her skin, and the thought of what it might do to her to feel his tongue follow suit had her eyes drifting shut on a moan. Spar chuckled softly and leaned closer until his breath teased th...
we got out of the car for air and suddenly both of us were stoned with joy to realize that in the darkness all around us was fragrant green grass and the smell of fresh manure and warm waters. 'We're in the South! We've left the winter!' Faint daybre...
And I think that it is certainly possible that the objective universe can be affected by the poet. I mean, you recall Orpheus made the trees and the stones dance and so forth, and this is something which is in almost all primitive cultures. I think i...
It will begin with the six who now tread the streets of a city where the stone pinnacle erects like a reed amongst long grass. Where a bridge expands across a gorge, drifts a cloud buzzing with a million stings. There, these six shall bleed. There, t...
Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fa...
It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things-- a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring-- with immense, even startling ...
Here's what vampires shouldn't be: pallid detectives that drink Bloody Marys and work only at night; lovelorn southern gentlemen; anorexic teenage girls; boy-toys with big dewy eyes. What should they be? Killers, honey. Stone killers that can't get e...
How often do we think "I am but one person, what can I do to make a difference", but we are all in this journey together. Each act of kindness, compassion, courtesy and Love is but a stone dropped into the lake of life causing a ripple; yet when we c...
The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than A Shore Thing, by Snooki. And it may be; Snooki definit...
Abby began to think that all the beauty and ugliness and turbulence one found scattered through nature, one could also find in people themselves, all collected there, all together in a single place. No matter what terror or loveliness the earth could...
It's the rule of the wilds. You must be bigger, and stronger, and tougher. A coldness radiates through me, a solid wall that is growing, piece by piece, in my chest. He doesn't love me. He never loved me. It was all a lie. "The old Lena is dead." I s...
In his temptation of Jesus, Satan quoted Scripture, and he didn't remember, misquote anything. God wants his children to eat bread, not to starve before stones. God will protect his anointed one with the angels of heaven. God will give his Messiah al...
What does this think about that? Nothing thinks about anything. Does the earth have consciousness of its stones and plants? If it did, it would be people. . . Why am I worrying about this? If I think about these things, I’ll stop seeing trees and p...
I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me. How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured, stoned and ...
In fact the flexibility of our memories makes it relatively easy because we can meld all these different memories together seamlessly to invent a new imaginary scene, one which we have never even contemplated before, let alone witnessed. The flexibil...
Suddenly the bridge was filled with intense warmth, Will had lit the fire. Everyone immediately scurried over to it, with the exception of Scott. Carrie looked back at him, he was sitting with his back leaned against a stone pillar. The light from th...
After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his...
