It may be that Christians, notwithstanding corporate worship, common prayer, and all their fellowship in service, may still be left to their loneliness. The final break-through to fellowship does not occur, because, though they have fellowship with o...
As she uttered the words of the prayer, she glanced up at him as if he were God Himself. He watched her with growing pleasure. In front of him was kneeling the directress, being humiliated by a subordinate; in front of him a naked revolutionary was b...
The goddess smiled. "You are a good hero, Percy Jackson. Not too proud. I like that. But you have much to learn. When Dionysus was made a god, I gave up my throne for him. It was the only way to avoid a civil war among the gods." "It unbalanced the C...
Even people whose lives have been made various by learning sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible - nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when th...
The intersection of pork and man was circumscribed with vagueness. Until now sausage was a mysterious world: the fenced-in landscapes of strange, exotic muds, the cloak-and-dagger butchers that veiled their conversations in Old French, the silencing ...
The god abandons Antony When at the hour of midnight an invisible choir is suddenly heard passing with exquisite music, with voices ― Do not lament your fortune that at last subsides, your life’s work that has failed, your schemes that have prove...
When World War II erupted, colonialism was at its apogee. The courde of the war, however, its symbolic undertones, would sow the seeds of the system's defeat and demise. [...] The central subject, the essence, the core relations between Europeans and...
Mary Lou suddenly realizes that Mack calls the temperature number because he is afraid to talk on the telephone, and by listening to a recording, he doesn’t have to reply. It’s his way of pretending that he’s involved. He wants it to snow so he...
When I was young” … “Before I was twenty, I mean, I used to think that life was a thing that kept gaining impetus, it would get richer and deeper each year. You kept learning more, getting wiser, having more insight, going further into the trut...
Depression is not dramatic, but it is total. It’s sneaky - you almost don’t notice it at first. Like a cat burglar, it comes in through an open window while you’re sleeping. It takes little things at first; your appetite, your desire to return ...
Another grave limitation of language is that it cannot, like music or gesture, do more than one thing at once. However the words in a great poet's phrase interinanimate one another and strike the mind as a quasi-instantaneous chord, yet, strictly spe...
Suddenly the memory of his wife came back to him and, no doubt feeling it would be too complicated to try to understand how he could have yielded to an impulse of happiness at such a time, he confined himself, in a habitual gesture of his whenever a ...
He had laid his head back until his scalp had contacted his spine, that far back, and opened his throat, and a sound rose in the auditorium like a wind coming from all four directions, low and terrifying, rumbling up from the ground beneath the floor...
I'm not ill like that," she groaned. He sat on her bed, peeling back the blanket. A servant entered, frowning at the mess on the floor, and shouted for help. "Then it what way?" “I,uh..." Her face was so hot she thought it would melt onto the floor...
…in that moment, as he saw and smelled how irresistible its effect was and how with lightning speed it spread and made captives of the people all around him—in that moment his whole disgust for humankind rose up again within him and completely so...
It was growing dark on this long southern evening, and suddenly, at the exact point her finger had indicated, the moon lifted a forehead of stunning gold above the horizon, lifted straight out of filigreed, light-intoxicated clouds that lay on the sk...
It's completely logical," explained the Dodecahedron. "The more you want, the less you get, and the less you get, the more you have. Simple arithmetic, that's all. Suppose you had something and added something to it. What would that make?" "More," sa...
But why do only unimportant things?" asked Milo, who suddenly remembered how much time he spent each day doing them. "Think of all the trouble it saves," the man explained, and his face looked as if he'd be grinning an evil grin--if he could grin at ...
It was now twenty minutes past four in the morning, allowing for the fact that the clock in the library of his town house was four minutes slow, as it had been for as far back as he could remember. He eyed it with a frown of concentration. Now that h...
For mile after mile the same melodic phrase rose up in my memory. I simply couldn’t get free of it. Each time it had a new fascination for me. Initially imprecise in outline, it seemed to become more and more intricately woven, as if to conceal fro...
[it] isn't something you just get over. You don't go back to being who you were. It's more like a snow globe. War shakes you up, and suddenly all those pieces of your life - muscles, bones, thoughts, beliefs, relationships, even your dreams - are flo...