Not town can live peacefully, whatever its laws," Plato wrote, "when its citizens ... do nothing but feast and drink and tire themselves out in the cares of love." But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few m...
Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something. Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something could turn into something else. It is really far more logical to start by saying ‘In the beginning God created heaven and eart...
Harry Potter is one boy in a long line of mythical heroes who have reminded the human race that we are so much more than we think we are, so much more powerful than we seem to know. Jesus said that we would someday do even greater works than He; shou...
No one can sing well, play well, or write well, without living through moments of the deepest pain and anguish. Every real talent has known times of torturing depression when the heart in its agony has cried out to God: “Why hast Thou forsaken me? ...
I thought that if I owned nothing, had nothing, was nothing, I would have nothing left to lose, and I wouldn't be scared anymore. Because my whole life I’ve been so damn scared. Scared to live because I was scared to die. But at the same I was so s...
Elle got up and walked over to the window. She put her hands up on the clear glass and surveyed the vast gardens below. Fiorins stood in clusters outside the castle-like structure. They whispered. Some simply stood and looked up at her. One Fiorin pu...
It is also worth noting that one can obtain a Ph.D. in any branch of science for no other purpose than to make cynical use of scientific language in an effort to rationalize the glaring inadequacies of tbe Bible. A handful of Christians appear to hav...
The fact was that, as droves of demon kings had noticed, there was a limit to what you could do to a soul with, e.g., red-hot tweezers, because even fairly evil and corrupt souls were bright enough to realize that since they didn't have the concomita...
My feet," said Montag. "I can't move them. I feel so damn silly. My feet won't move!" "Listen. Easy now," said the old man gently. "I know, I know. You're afraid of making mistakes. be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was young I my ignoranc...
We'll go on the river. He looked at the old railroad tracks. Or we'll go that way. Or we'll walk on the highways now, and we'll have time to put things into ourselves. And some day, after it sets in us a long time, it'll come out our hands and our mo...
I was cyber-bullied before all those Myspace-related suicides, so my school principal wasn't really impressed when my mom complained about what was happening to me on my Xanga blog and on AIM chat. “Get your life sorted out, you fucking scitzo [sic...
I will miss it so,” she said beside him. “This hell of a place, I will miss it so much. This fat body, walking mud puddle, deceived by everything, this impossible, ruinous accident of a world, these people who would truly rather hurt one another ...
If you have the power to hit people over the head whenever you want, you don’t have to trouble yourself too much figuring out what they think is going on, and therefore, generally speaking, you don’t. Hence the sure-fire way to simplify social ar...
Love is not a thing you can pick up and throw into the gutter and pick up again as the fancy takes you. I am a person, very unfortunately for you, with a quite peculiar dread of thrusting myself or my affections on any one, of in any way outstaying m...
I'm living at a peak of clarity and beauty I never knew existed. Every part of me is attuned to the work. I soak it up into my pores during the day, and at night—in the moments before I pass off into sleep—ideas explode into my head like firework...
Because that world's gone. The world where people walked around whistling that music. All the madrigal singers in the world can't make that other one real again. It's like dinosaurs. We can put them back together perfectly, bone for bone, but we don'...
That’s why we all hate ’em, he thought. Those expressionless eyes watch us, those big faces turn to follow us, and doesn’t it just look as if they’re making notes and taking names? If you heard that one had bashed in someone’s head over in ...
An even more pointed example of the the power of the silence tabu in libraries occurred in Duluth in 1981. The police were pursuing a fugitive from justice who ran into the public library. Uniformed police surrounded the building, and the library dir...
Paul Buchheit: I'm suddenly reminded that, for a while, I asked people if they were playing Russian Roulette with a gun with a billion barrels (or some huge number, so in other words, some low probability that they would actually be killed), how much...
How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depend directly on how to the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the controls we are able to exert over the great...
I want to love every piece of you. I want to be inside you. I want our bodies together, to make the two of us into one. I want it all, and I want it hard, soft, anything that will make you happy. I want to hold you, keep you safe, make you scream... ...
