Look, I say. You can't just let your thoughts float around in the ether and hope eventually they'll connect with something. It's absurd. No, it's not, Gil says. Lots of good things happen that way. Penicillin. Teflon. Smart dust. Something happens th...
Jacques practically choked on his coffee. Did she just suggest what I think she did? “Jerard is a close friend of mine. He’s a great...” He stopped the worthless chatter about Jerard. He had to know. “Are you a submissive?” Her eyes flicked...
There, there, best to bring it all up,' she said. My memory was in shreds. Imagine a photograph cut into narrow strips then jumbled up. Everything is there, but you can't see the whole picture and even the strips have no bearing on reality. I did kno...
After dinner Natasha went to the clavichord, at Prince Andrey's request, and began singing. Prince Andrey stood at the window, talking to the ladies, and listened to her. In the middle of a phrase, Prince Andrey ceased speaking, and felt suddenly a l...
I write. My hand is shaking; my eyes sting and fill. I add before pushing the notebook and pen back across the table, wiping a hand across my cheeks. As he reads, my impulse is to reach out, grab the notebook, run outside, dump it in the trash, bury ...
No long-term marriage is made easily, and there have been times when I've been so angry or so hurt that I thought my love would never recover. And then, in the midst of near despair, something has happened beneath the surface. A bright little flashin...
The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of l...
Do you have a leather jacket? One for a ten-year-old boy?" I asked the man selling leather jackets and gloves in Covent Garden, London. "Yes, I have one right here!" And the man dug out a fine leather jacket that looked styled and tailored for a youn...
Virgil: [looking at the picture Lindsey took of the alien craft] That's a great shot, Linds. Catfish De Vries: You drop your dive light? Lindsey Brigman: No, come on you guys, come on. Now that's the small one, that's the small one here. You can kind...
Look, I asked you here for a reason. Much as I hate to admit it, vampire, we have something in common. " "Totally awesome hair?" Simon suggested, but his heart wasn't really in it either. Something about the look on Jace's face was making him increas...
Petunia only ever went to the doctor reluctantly, and her motive in doing so was always the same: she did it in order to feel less anxious about things. The doctor was supposed to make the worry go away; she did quite enough worrying without actually...
When we dislike someone, or feel threatened by someone, the natural tendency is to focus on something we dislike about the person, something that irritates us. Unfortunately, when we do this--instead of seeing the deeper beauty of the person and givi...
That's what dreams are really like, you know? They're not full of melting clocks or floating roses or people made out of rocks. Most of the time, dreams look just like the normal world. It's your feelings that tell you something's off. Not your mind,...
Knowing is not simply a material act, since the object that is known always conceals something beyond the empirical datum. All our knowledge, even the most simple, is always a minor miracle, since it can never be fully explained by the material instr...
Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is part of evolution. If cod and haddock and other...
I learned as a kid that homo sapiens would rather fight other homo sapiens than microbes. For one thing, it’s easier. And there’s something satisfying about knowing somebody else is the bad guy and seeing them laid out on the street in front of y...
Clay sat up, swinging a leg over Jeff's body to straddle him. He grabbed both wrists and pinned them by Jeff's head, bending closer until they shared a breath between parted lips. "There's something about you, Jeff. Always something." "I'm just an or...
Emil on top of me, his breath heavy on my neck. As our eyes met and held, the playfulness turned into something else entirely, something with a lot more heat. Emil leaned in, barely brushing his lips against my own he whispered, “We were good at th...
Today the word "hero" has been diminished. confused with "celebrity." But in my father's generation the word meant something. celebrities seek fame. They take actions to get attention. Most often, the actions they take have no particular moral conten...
She thought back to what he had said. /I could make you very happy./ It was something men said then, when they were trying to persuade you, and that was what they meant. It seemed rash and sweeping to her, dazzling but *presumptuous*. She had to try ...
No swamp dragon could ever terrorise a kingdom, except by accident. Vimes wondered how many had been killed by enterprising heroes. It was terribly cruel to do something like that to creatures whose only crime was to blow themselves absent-mindedly t...
