If We Must Die If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursèd lot. If we must die, O let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may no...
The moon grew plump and pale as a peeled apple, waned into the passing nights, then showed itself again as a thin silver crescent in the twilit western sky. The shed of leaves became a cascade of red and gold and after a time the trees stood skeletal...
Ray Arnold: Um... It's OK. [looking at one of the computers in the control room] Ray Arnold: Look, see that. It's on. It worked. Dr. Ian Malcolm: What... what do you mean, it worked? Everything's still off. Ray Arnold: Well, maybe the shutdown trippe...
Pre-Crime Public Service Announcer: Imagine, a world with out, murder. 6 years ago, the homicidal rates had reached epidemic proportions. It seemed that only a miracle could stop the blood shed, but instead of 1 miracle, we were given 3, the precogni...
What people had had shed and left--a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes--those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks ...
Sometimes I think that wisdoms slip from my mind like drool from the lips of an idiot... Where's all this stuff coming from? Is it any good? Any good in, you know, the wisdom sense? Who am I to spout this stuff anyway? Well, here's the thing. You too...
Each pregnant Oak ten thousand acorns forms Profusely scatter'd by autumnal storms; Ten thousand seeds each pregnant poppy sheds Profusely scatter'd from its waving heads; The countless Aphides, prolific tribe, With greedy trunks the honey'd sap imbi...
Beneath Albright’s office, the colliery sprawled across the hillside, red brick buildings scattered as though hurled from a great height, a hotchpotch of mismatched structures spattered on the valley floor. At the bottom stood the winding house, wh...
Recent brain scans have shed light on how the brain simulates the future. These simulation are done mainly in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the CEO of the brain, using memories of the past. On one hand, simulations of the future may produce out...
Yes, it was a "beautiful" sermon, tugging the emotions and conjuring up pictures of greatness and peace. But were they talking about the decent peppery ordinary old man he knew, or had the subject strayed to the story of some saint of the past? Or we...
Tshepo reckons that it is inevitable that one’s circle of friends will become smaller as one grows older. He reasons that when we begin we are similar, like two glasses of water sitting side by side on a clean tray. There is very little that differ...
Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of th...
Odysseus draped the towel over his shoulders and stretched his back. "You remember practicing with wooden swords? All the moves, the blocks, the counters, getting your footwork right, learning how to be in balance always?" "Of course you were a hard ...
I am beginning to be sorry that I ever undertook to write this book. Not that it bores me; I have nothing else to do; indeed, it is a welcome distraction from eternity. But the book is tedious, it smells of the tomb, it has a rigor mortis about it; a...
I had survived the work gangs in the ghetto. Baked bread under cover of night. Hidden in a pigeon coop. Had a midnight bar mitzvah in the basement of an abandoned building. I had watched my parents be taken away to their deaths, had avoided Amon Goet...
...I'm a fool. I expect too much, then I'm angry because nothing ever works out the way I want. When I was young and full of hopes and aspirations, I didn't know I would get hurt so often. I think I'll get tough and won't ache again, then my fragile ...
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and ...
Listen, listen!" I interrupted her. "Forgive me if I tell you something else.... I tell you what, I can't help coming here to-morrow, I am a dreamer; I have so little real life that I look upon such moments as this now, as so rare, that I cannot help...
Travelling the dusty highways in the early evenings, just as the light began to fade, I would look out along the perpendicular dirt tracks that joined the road at intervals. They undulated away gently into the distance; slow streams of people in twos...
I was once reproved by a minister who was driving a poor beast to some meeting-house horse-sheds among the hills of New Hampshire, because I was bending my steps to a mountain-top on the Sabbath, instead of a church, when I would have gone farther th...
But nothing was said about chicken farming anymore. Once, long after it was too late for farming, he might catch her crying and pet her a bit. 'What's the matter, little baby? You got a fever? You want to take the night off?' She might murmur somethi...