When we set about accounting for a Napoleon or a Shakespeare or a Raphael or a Wagner or an Edison or other extraordinary person, we understand that the measure of his talent will not explain the whole result, nor even the largest part of it; no, it ...
Malphas surveyed the women's bodies with utter disgust and sorrow until he realized Tabitha was still alive. He knelt by her side and cradled her head tenderly. "Tabby... I'm so sorry" Grimacing she opened her eyes as she labored to breathe. She laug...
means you feel the pulse of other people's pain as well as your own, and saying it means you take a share of it. And so it binds us together, makes us trodden and sodden as one another. is a lot of things. It's a hole refilled. A debt repaid. is the ...
They could tell the whole hateful story of it, set forth in the inner soul of a city in which honor and justice, women's bodies and men's souls, were for sale in the market-place, and human beings writhed and fought and fell upon each other like wolv...
We do not realize how deeply our starting assumptions affect the way we go about looking for and interpreting the data we collect. We should recognize that nonhuman organisms need not meet every new definition of human language, tool use, mind, or co...
You ain’t old yet but when you get old, all the women in the village start to look down on you when they find out you want to do something other than sweep the kitchen or cut up vegetables. Had this big starch mango tree when I was small. Anytime I...
Know that it is your birthright to awaken. Seeking Truth is the ultimate quest of every moral citizen. Truth is felt first in the heart, and then the mind. The voice of your conscience comes from your heart, not your mind. The voice of reason comes f...
Governor Paetus...’ Lupus closed his eyes that we might not read the rage in them. ‘Governor Paetus has informed us that he will return to our camp at Rhandaea with the Fourth legion, there to build the palisades and set up defences sufficient to...
I didn't know what to think, but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up. The only think I could compare it to was the feeling I got one time when I walked from the peach stand and saw the sun ...
And I'll have you know that if you hurt my son again, if he so much as sighs sadly over his coffee, I will hire a man, a Russian, probably, to hunt you down and rip all that shiny black hair from your head, then break your skinny arms and legs, and s...
Jesus Hollywood believed in a lot of things. He believed that stars were ghosts of family long since past and that he was more likely to die from an asteroid falling from the sky than another human being getting the better of him. He believed that ch...
I glanced up at the trees too. Dead. Every one of them gray and white, needles rusted, leaves shriveled at the tips of branches. All the life sucked out of them. Not just the trees. All the plants, ferns, grasses and brush were shriveled, brown, barr...
When may did so, he found every cup and saucer, plate, vase, and bowl standing arranged across the floor like pieces in a scaled-up chess game. "The Whitstable family tree," Bryant explained, entering and setting down his tea tray. "It's the only way...
We describe a person without compassion as “heartless,” and we urge him or her to “have a heart.” Our deepest hurts we call “heartaches.” Jilted lovers are “brokenhearted.” Courageous soldiers are “bravehearted.” The truly evil ar...
All night, after the exhausting games of canasta, we would look over the immense sea, full of white-flecked and green reflections, the two of us leaning side by side on the railing, each of us far away, flying in his own aircraft to the stratospheric...
At night, after the exhausting games of canasta, we would look out over the immense sea, full of white-flecked and green reflections, the two of us leaning side by side on the railing, each of us far away, flying in his own aircraft to the stratosphe...
I let that swim around in my aching head for a few minutes - "the arsenal of megadeath...the arsenal of megadeath" - and then, for some reason I can't quite explain, I began to write. Using a borrowed pencil and a cupcake wrapper, I wrote the first l...
Not only are there meaningless questions, but many of the problems with which the human intellect has tortured itself turn out to be only 'pseudo problems,' because they can be formulated only in terms of questions which are meaningless. Many of the ...
I touched the moon last night; a golden glow beyond my grasp. Eons before me it rested there. It will remain when I am dust. My hand now glows from the embrace. Voices echo through nights past, and with the glow, caress my face. My finger faints from...
The biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three on them sitting ...
I am developing new coping mechanisms for lost words and lost negatives, as here for instance: compensate by describing the episode instead. When something is lost, redirect energy, follow the derivé, the chance and flow of what life tosses us, and ...
