Throughout history, there have been people who mattered more. Some of them, like Ulysses S. Grant and Winston Churchill and Jonas Salk, changed the course of history in grand strokes. Others, like Reuben Styrlund and Dora Salk, made a meaningful diff...
Of course, we all go through our own experiences. If we do not push ourselves enough, we do not grow, but if we push ourselves too much, we regress. What is enough will change, depending on where we are and what we are doing. In that sense, the prese...
The girl remains on the ground. He looks at her and she looks at him and the air feels at once static and loaded, as if there is some kind of undersound his ear can't quite decipher. Like after a bell rings. That's how it is between them. There is so...
What is meant by 'reality'? It would seem something very erratic, very undependable-now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying...
You see, there's some blues for folks ain't never had a thing, and that's a sad blues ... but the saddest kind of blues is for them that's had everything they ever wanted and has lost it, and knows it won't come back no more. Ain't no sufferin' in th...
As water cannot rise higher than its source, so the moral quality in an act can never be higher than the motive that inspires it. For this reason no act that arises from an evil motive can be good, even though some good may appear to come out of it. ...
I’m out of health potions. Retreat! Retreat! Give me some of your health potions!” I screamed. “I don’t have any potions. Run, bitch, run,” Brody squealed. The red ran out on my health and my assassin was transported, stripped of everything...
Air traffic control is going to have a steamy old fit on your dime, boy. They can get in line behind the police, the people whose cars we trashed, the Empire of Ob'enn, the Partnership Collective, and the Wormgate Corporation. Oh, and I think maybe s...
MacKenzie started to look frightened and Valor looked like he was going to kill somebody if they didn't stop scaring his girlfriend. At the same time, Victor looked like he was ready to step in and take control of the situation. And if these suits de...
There is something deeply awe-inspiring about the sight of any living creatures in incomputable numbers; it stirs, perhaps, some atavistic chord whose note belongs more properly to the distant days when we were a true part of the animal ecology; when...
It would be especially comforting to believe that I have the answer to the question, What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that’s that—the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness, persist? What will th...
The age of lost innocence varies for each person. Some lose it when they learn that their childhood fantasies are merely myth, while others lose theirs due to trauma. As adults, we often look down our noses at those who manage to retain their innocen...
If you believe that humans are animals, there can be no such thing as the history of humanity, only the lives of particular humans. If we speak of the history of the species at all, it is only to signify the unknowable sum of these lives. As with oth...
As long as a population can be induced to believe in a supernatural hereafter, it can be oppressed and controlled. People will put up with all sorts of tyranny, poverty, and painful treatment if they're convinced that they'll eventually escape to som...
It is easy to forget, not that we ever should, that everything in this world is an accident, including the origin of life itself, plus the accumulation of riches. We should show more respect for nature, not less. An accident isn't necessarily ever ov...
No, that flapping isn't all the pigeons in the park zeroing in on some spilled popcorn! That antediluvian (old and prehistoric) scream that's numbing your brain isn't a subway on a curve! No, it's the one and only --just released from a long, long na...
Oh, darlin’, I’m gonna walk you through it, kiss you through it, feel you through it, taste you through it. Hell, I’m hoping you call out my name through it, but for some reason, if I can’t get you off, by all means, play along. It won’t hu...
Even with all their threats of eternal damnation and soul roasting, Christian missionaries have run across some who were not so quick to swallow their drivel. Pleasure and pain, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder. So, when missionaries ventu...
Yet because her needs and yearnings are real and pressing, she must find some way to express them: she puts into body what she cannot yet put into words. Her eating disorder serves as her voice, her attempt to express and meet her needs and desires w...
Both Christian and Adrian had worried there would be some piece of Strigoi left in him, but their fears had been about violence and bloodshed. No one would have guessed this: that living as a Strigoi had hardened his heart, killing any chance of him ...
I’ve noticed in my life that the people who act as my angels are not some strange angelic creatures that seem almost untouchable, but are more real than that. They are people who have tasted sorrow, who have felt pain, and in a way, that makes them...
