Abstract design is all right—for wallpaper or linoleum. But is the process of evoking pity or terror, which is not abstract at all but very human.
To my mother, I was everything. To my father, nothing at all. To my grandmother, I was a daily reminder of loves long lost.
But goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.
The only religious opinion I feel sure of is this: self-awareness is not just a bunch of amino acids bumping together.
Christ is sufficient. We do not need "support groups" for each and every separate tribulation. The most widely divergent sorrows may all be taken to the foot of the same old rugged cross and find there cleansing, peace, and joy.
If there’s one thing I have learned it’s that if you carry on as though nothing strange is happening, it usually stops being strange
Dogs and children vomit in distress. Women cry. ("Dial 'O' For Operator")
He smiled then, bringing back that twinge in her stomach, something that she only later recognized as the pangs of desire.
Losing maturity in one’s fiction for the sake of marvels and monsters can also mean losing propriety, and that’s not always a bad thing.
We all dream; we do not understand our dreams, yet we act as if nothing strange goes on in our sleep minds, strange at least by comparison with the logical, purposeful doings of our minds when we are awake.
If you're in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.
Tis strange,-but true; for truth is always strange; Stranger than fiction: if it could be told, How much would novels gain by the exchange! How differently the world would men behold!
The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.
Most true things are kind of corny, don’t you think? But we make them more sophisticated out of sheer embarrassment.
Justice is not cheap in this country, and people who insist on it are usually either desperate or possessed by some private determination bordering on monomania.
Some of us, perhaps all of us, believe that it is legitimate to kill enemy soldiers in a war, as if war were a special circumstance that shrinks the sizes of enemy souls.
For, though the room was silent, the silence of half a hundred cats is a peculiar thing, like fifty individual silences all piled one on top of another.
Time and I have quarrelled. All hours are midnight now. I had a clock and a watch, but I destroyed them both. I could not bear the way they mocked me.
For some the label sci-fi is just a shortand for science fiction, an alternative to sf gesturing at ... you know, that stuff we like.
–It’s not Sci-Fi, we insist, It’s SF. Every time you say that a Venusian Slime Boy dies, you know.
This is the fiction that I’m referring to as rhapsody, this stitching of mimetic representation, oneiric imagery, ludic rules, allegoric morals, satiric critique and diegetic story into complex quiltings of narrative.
