The design of a city is like a strange archeology.
The quick success was a bit strange to get used to.
There is a moment between waking and sleeping and between sleeping and waking when the mind seems to be in many places at once, when memories mingle with dreams, when what has been and what is yet to be exist side by side, and when the mind slips fre...
God is not many. God is one. But many and divers are yet men's shadows. So long as men cast shadows on the earth, so long as each man's god no greater than hi shadow. The shadow-less only are all in the light. The shadow-less only know one god. For g...
How’s things, man?” The black man extended his hand for a handshake. Mathematical formulae were jotted on the sleeve of his shirt, right up to the elbow. “Very good,” said Peter. It had never occurred to him before that dark-skinned people di...
Clothes are nothing more than a fig leaf. And the bodies beneath are just another layer of clothing, an outfit of flesh with an impractically thin leather exterior, in various shades of pink, yellow and brown. The souls alone are real. Seen in this w...
When you're asked to stay out of a bar you don't just punch the owner--you come back with your army and tear the place down, destroy the whole edifice and everything it stands for. No compromise. If a man gets wise, mash his face. If a woman snubs yo...
It had been a bad trip ... fast and wild in some moments, slow and dirty in others, but on balance it looked like a bummer. On my way back to San Francisco, I tried to compose a fitting epitaph. I wanted something original, but there was no escaping ...
Yet it is true—skin can mean a great deal. Mine means that any man may strike me in a public place and never fear the consequences. It means that my friends do not always like to be seen with me in the street. It means that no matter how many books...
For the rest of the night he sat by himself under the elm-tree. Until this moment it had never seemed to him that his magicianship set him apart from other men. But now he had glimpsed the wrong side of something. He had the eeriest feeling - as if t...
We saw Uncle Jack every Christmas, and every Christmas he yelled across the street for Miss Maudie to come marry him. Miss Mauide would yell back, "Call a little louder, Jack Finch, and they'll hear you the post office, I haven't heard you yet!" Jem ...
Many people in Nixon’s camp had genuine faith in affirmative action. It wasn’t designed to fail, but it wasn’t designed to succeed, either; the intent behind it was not rooted in a desire to help black people attain equal standing in society. I...
Addicts don't like when you tell them they are all the same. Of course not. Who would? But to me, addicts are like actresses, who all audition for the same role in a horror movie. It doesn't matter how they got to the audition. It doesn't matter how ...
If God existed (a question concerning which Jubal maintained a meticulous intellectual neutrality) and if He desired to be worshiped (a proposition which Jubal found inherently improbable but conceivably possible in the dim light of his own ignorance...
Here, by the grace of God and an inside straight, we have a personality untouched by the psychotic taboos of our tribe - and you want to turn him into a carbon copy of every fourth-rate conformist in this frightened land! Why don't you go whole hog? ...
Cincinatti was where I learned that running away from your problems has a three-month statute of limitations, a lesson I have found repeatedly to be true. Three months is still a first impression -- of a city, of other people, of yourself in that pla...
When He'd told his mother he wanted to go to military school so he could though up, she'd given him a strange look. (Not as strange as if he'd said he wanted to go to demon-fighting school so he could drink from the Mortal Cup, Ascend to the ranks of...
One spirit remained unaware of his presence, staring at Miss Parker with such longing that he reluctantly decided to let it stay. The spirit, a hollow-eyed girl with ringlets and clothing from long past, reached toward Percy, wishing to touch her. Al...
I picture it like Judgement Day,' he says finally, his eyes on the water. 'We'll rise up out of our bodies and find each other again in spirit form. We'll meet in that new place, all of us together, and first it'll seem strange, and pretty soon it'll...
You ask me if I do not think that men are strange beings - I do indeed, I have often thought so - and I think too that the mode of bringing them up is strange, they are not half sufficiently guarded from temptation - Girls are protected as if they we...
[first lines] Bagheera: Many strange legends are told of these jungles of India, but none so strange as the story of a small boy named Mowgli. It all began when the silence of the jungle was broken by an unfamiliar sound. [Sound of baby crying] Baghe...
