Raphael's hand tightened on the hilt of the knife. His knuckles were white. He spoke to Magnus. "I have no soul," he said. "But I made you a promise on my mother's doorstep, and she was sacred to me." "Santiago- " Sebastian began. "I was a child then...
His whole being, his whole life was awakened in one instant, as if youth returned to him, as if the extinguished sparks of talent blazed up again. The blindfold suddenly fell from his eyes. God! to ruin the best years of his youth so mercilessly; to ...
Something Simon composed years ago is playing on someone else’s personal headphones; it’s a man sat opposite him in the waiting room. He believes the man is destroying his piece by reading a car magazine at the same time, like both forms of atten...
You're not hurt, Watson? For God's sake, say that you are not hurt!" It was worth a wound -- it was worth many wounds -- to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the fir...
She leans over the desk to write and even though I feel bad for doing it, I watch her body as she does. Her shirt lifts just a little as she’s bending over and whether she’s aware of it or not, her lower back is exposed. I’ve spent the last eig...
I was struck - not for the first time in my years of travel - by how isolating contemporary American society can seem by comparison. Where I came from, we have shriveled down the notion of what constitutes 'a family unit' to such a tiny scale that it...
When one ponders on the tremendous journey of evolution over the past three billion years or so, the prodigious wealth of structures it has engendered, and the extraordinarily effective teleonomic performances of living beings from bacteria to man, o...
For you [God] are infinite and never change. In you 'today' never comes to an end: and yet our 'today' does come to an end in you, because time, as well as everything else, exists in you. If it did not, it would have no means of passing. And since yo...
Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, ...
I am convinced that being fully committed to the moment, without any worries about the past or projections into the future, is the best attribute a closer can have. You wonder why the shelf life of so many short relievers is, well, so short? Why guys...
What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of ...
Leonard and Virginia married in August 1912. Virginia was 30. Soon after her marriage she suVered another breakdown and her mental health declined sporadically over the following year, culminating in a suicide attempt in September 1913. They were adv...
I felt a hand on my back, movement behind me, my guys making room, someone squeezing into our circle, and then one last hand joined the pile: my Korean aide. I guess it made sense. We were her real family. The closest thing she’d ever had to a real...
I stop reading after half an hour. I’ve had enough. Humanity has hit a brick wall. We’re facing our end, like the dinosaurs millions of years before us. The only difference is we’ve got journalists on hand to document every blow and setback, ca...
I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water...
What is it about human nature that when we are touched in a way that is life changing we want to share the experience with others. I have to think it is about bringing gifts from spirit back to the spirit in humans. All I know is that after I experie...
The conclusion of intelligent design flows naturally from the data itself—not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs. Inferring that biochemical systems were designed by an intelligent agent is a humdrum process that requires no new principles of l...
I, myself, searched for Sham-bha-la for eleven years. I am perhaps a little wiser than I was, but it may be I am only lazy and afraid. At any rate, it seems to me a waste of energy to try to learn what is beyond my understanding. I don't even underst...
Hell if I know. I’m twenty-six, single, just signed a year lease on an apartment…” She touched her eyebrows with her fingertips. “Damn, why did I move back here?” “Sorry.” I grimaced. “The job market isn’t as bad as it was. I’d gi...
Lemons. He liked lemons. They made you make funny faces when you bit them, and a very, very long way in the future there was a really amazing planet where they'd evolved into people and lived in harmony with a variety of hyper-intelligent bee. Evolut...
In the radical feminist view, the new feminism is not just the revival of a serious political movement for social equality. It is the second wave of the most important revolution in history. Its aim: the overthrow of the oldest, most rigid class/cast...
