And that was something Gwen had on Zoey—she saw the shadow surrounding him, the one he so easily hid from everyone else. Perched on his lap, her pupils were big and her pretty mouth tense. She was afraid of him. But rather than scare her off, the f...
...it’s just another one of those things I don’t understand: everyone impresses upon you how unique you are, encouraging you to cultivate your individuality while at the same time trying to squish you and everyone else into the same ridiculous mo...
He used to call vampires "the breathing ghosts"- for, as he put it, we existed in a kind of limbo-land between the living and the dead. We breathed, but we were not alive. We flitted through the air, but we still left foot prints on the ground. We we...
the normal laws of development are inverted here in the Congo. The forest, not the town, offers the safest sanctuary and it is grandfathers who have been more exposed to modernity than their grandchildren. I can think of nowhere else on the planet wh...
But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more s...
Oh,” he said, knocking a red ball into a hole. “It’s you.” “You were expecting someone else?” I asked. “Am I interrupting your social calendar?” I made a big show of glancing around the empty room. “I don’t want to keep you from t...
But now I understand something more fully that I once only understood abstractly. I see how utterly ridiculous it is to think that the state can be the right means to help those who are poor or living at the margins of society. The state is their ene...
Everyone not already following their own path would begin to feel dissatisfied with themselves and be forced to make a choice: they would either have to accept an existence beset with disappointment and pain or else come to realise that everyone was ...
The people through which the Tradition of the Sun spoke were people just like anyone else, and who, one morning or one evening, looked at the world and felt the presence of something greater. They had unwittingly plunged into an unknown sea, and, for...
I would not trade any of these features for anybody else’s. I wouldn’t trade the small thin-lipped mouth that makes me resemble my nephew. I wouldn’t even trade the acne scar on my right cheek, because that recurring zit spent more time with me...
But don’t ever let yourself forget that the person you care about fills an emptiness no one else ever has and that while life with them can seriously suck at times, those moments when it doesn’t are worth all the aggravation of falling into the t...
There is one advantage to realizing that you're never going to get it right: you do begin to stop expecting everyone else to get it right too, which makes for less frustration when other people turn out to be just as human as you are.
We know there are colours in the spectrum untranslatable to our eyes; sounds beyond the range of our hearing; sensations beyond the tolerance of taste or touch. What else is there that we might be missing? Could it be that we, ourselves, only ever re...
Tell me of this Wizard Howl of yours". Sophie's teeth chattered but she said proudly, "He's the best wizard in Ingary or anywhere else. If he'd only had time, he would have defeated that djinn. And he's sly and selfish and vain as a peacock and cowar...
I was living at home until about 27 and decided it was time to move out and move somewhere else, so that's what I did. I wanted it to be the right thing to do. I didn't want to buy something out of my price range; I didn't want to be stupid with my m...
But people as a rule believe only what they want to believe, and if you tell them anything else they'll call you a trouble-maker and get rid of you and never give you your job back, even if what you said is proved spot on right by time.
The point is as long as it doesn’t affect others in a negative manner then just do what you enjoy doing as often as possible, it’s simple. That philosophy should underpin society and it’s something that nanny states just don’t get – that li...
If you decide to just go with the flow, you'll end up where the flow goes, which is usually downhill, often leading to a big pile of sludge and a life of unhappiness. You'll end up doing what everyone else is doing.
Has it ever struck you as odd that humans are the only creatures on the planet who wear clothes? Everything else, from aardvarks to zebras, is running around in its birthday suit, blissfully unclear of the concept of underpants. Why don't people do t...
Another thing I take issue with are people who take their dogs on "play dates," or even worse, people who choose to dress their dogs up in outfits better suited for homosexuals participating in a gay pride parade. Dog costumes are right up there with...
We reject the blame game and accusations so common in efficient groups. With each person accepting full responsibility for their actions, no on can have any more of the blame than anyone else. Let's all be accountable to ourselves, so we can grow and...
