It was the exact opposite for me. At first all I wanted was sex with her, but soon I wanted more. More sex, yes, in unusual places, and all different kinds. But that wasn’t all. I wanted her to fill the empty spaces left by a father who never once ...
Throughout the world what remains of the vast public spaces are now only the stuff of legends: Robin Hood’s forest, the Great Plains of the Amerindians, the steppes of the nomadic tribes, and so forth… Rousseau said that the first person who want...
I feel the monster of grief again, writhing in the empty space where my heart and stomach used to be. I gasp, pressing both palms to my chest. Now the monstrous thing has its claws around my throat, squeezing my airway. I twist and put my head betwee...
Lights come and go in the night sky. Men, troubled at last by the things they build, may toss in their sleep and dream bad dreams, or lie awake while the meteors whisper greenly overhead. But nowhere in all space or on a thousand worlds will there be...
This capacity for living easily and familiarly at an extraordinary level of abstraction is the source of modern man's power. With it he has transformed the planet, annihilated space, and trebled the world's population. But it is also a power which ha...
These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice... and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening i...
Don't the overwhelming majority believe that mankind is the crowning achievement of Creation, that man is better than everything, even things we haven't yet investigated? And don't those people who aren't able to escape the bonds of their own ego thi...
You see, I cannot share my space with them. Not only am I severely claustrophobic but I abhor the mass. In general, I do not like people very much. Those I cannot sand are the average ones that eat with their hands out of plastic plates and travel in...
Basically, if the mind stays in the present, it’s impossible to worry. Upon careful consideration, it becomes clear that human beings are capable of worrying only about an event that has already transpired or one that may take place in the future (...
Not just a name but a state of mind I never want to revisit, although I do keep him at the back of my mind for those times I get my hopes raised about something. So then I can slap myself into reality and remind myself of what happens when you let so...
Inside, upstairs, where the planes are met, the spaces are long and low and lined in tasteful felt gray like that cocky stewardess's cap and filled with the kind of music you become aware of only when the elevator stops or when the dentist stops dril...
Adam Antonovich's father was a tubby tyrant with a triple chin and chinks where his eyes should have been. All his life he had amassed money. In old age he had exchanged it for space; his estates grew, grew and swelled. ("Adam")
That night two lovers whispering under the lead canopy of the church were killed by their own passion. Their effusion of words, unable to escape through the Saturnian discipline of lead, so filled the spaces of the loft that the air was all driven aw...
You're welcome in my house when this is over. We'll open a cask of Master al'Vere's best brandy. We'll remember those who fell, and we'll tell our children how we stood when the clouds turned black and the world started to die. We'll tell them we sto...
I find these comparisons particularly poignant: life versus death, hope versus fear. Space exploration and the highly mechanized destruction of people use similar technology and manufacturers, and similar human qualities of organization and daring. C...
I remember going swimming as a child and making a wish before I jumped into the pool. [...] I'd stretch my arms out, as if I were sending my thoughts right into space. I'd make my wish, then I'd dive into the water. I'd say to myself, "This is my dre...
I suppose it is possible to be all of these things. To sort of fall out of who you are into another, as well as to journey back to some essential sense of self. We only see what we see. He was whatever he needed to be, what we asked him to be. Perhap...
He guided her hands lower, over her own soft belly, her hips, the tops of her thighs. The oils they spread there left a sheen upon her flesh. A sheen that glistened as firelight and shadows caroused about the space. His grasped her wrists and he urge...
I would enter the desert alone, to leave in the sand endless footprints only to be obliterated by the wind, to walk the same path each day expecting the same path tomorrow, and perhaps to cease wondering at the bloom and wither of lilies only to ling...
The heaving sickness past, her nausea gone, her bodily fluids replaced, she felt the lightness of being in the open space around her. Her walls the canyon's walls, she owned them not at all; her floor, the river beach. Her view, the heavens. It was, ...
In normal everyday usage, "I" embodies the primordial error, a misperception of who you are, an illusory sense of identity. This is the ego. The illusory sense of self is what Albert Einstein, who had deep insights not only into the reality of space ...
