Most of the planet's terrestrial surfaces are visually accessible through video cameras and satellite imagery, if not physically within reach. Even the approaches to Mount Everest are now littered with human debris. One can drive to Timbuktu, which f...
Before she can stop herself, she thinks about desire, how it lives within you and yet is separate, surfacing when it chooses, without permission, in the harsh afternoon light, at the moment when you least expect to find it.
You know how fighting fish do it? They blow bubbles and in each one of those bubbles is an egg and they float the egg up to the surface. They keep this whole heavy nest of eggs floating, and they're constantly repairing it. It's as if they live in bo...
Oh, the miraculous energy that flows between two people who care enough to get beyond surfaces and games, who are willing to take the risks of being totally open, of listening, of responding with the whole heart. How much we can do for each other.
As a novelist, you deepen your characters as you go, adding layers. As a reporter, you try to peel layers away: observing subjects enough to get beneath the surface, re-questioning a source to find the facts. But these processes aren't so different.
I think you have to be crazy not to want to work on the Joker! I can't think of many characters, heroes or villains, that are as malleable as him. He really can be interpreted in so many different ways, and generally, people don't really want to scra...
There were some that were of so rare a beauty that my pleasure on catching sight of them was enhanced by surprise. By what privilege, on one morning rather than another, did the window on being uncurtained disclose to my wondering eyes the nymph Glau...
There was something about the smell of books, the ink-and-paper-and-leather scent, the way dust in a library seemed to behave differently from the dust in any other room -- it was golden in the light of the witchlight tapers, setting like pollen acro...
A blanket would be a great surface to print my new book on, so you could read it in bed while you’re having boring, obligatory sex with your spouse, who’s as dry and exciting as a sack of flour.
So much of history is mystery. We don't know what is lost forever, what will surface again. All objects exist in a moment of time. And that fragment of time is preserved or lost or found in mysterious ways. Mystery is a wonderful part of life.
It may be that until now there has been no more potent means for beautifying man himself than piety: it can turn man into so much art, surface, play of colors, graciousness that his sight no longer makes one suffer.---
I want people who write to crash or dive below the surface, where life is so cold and confusing and hard to see. Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth.
I am convinced that a good building must be capable of absorbing the traces of human life and taking on a specific richness... I think of the patina of age on materials, of innumerable small scratches on surfaces, of varnish that has grown dull and b...
Legend has it that while drinking wine in a boat on the river, [8th century Chinese poet Li Po] tried to grab the moon's reflection on the surface and tumbled in, which is probably the poet's equivalent of dying bravely in battle.
Sex is not about reproduc-tion, gender is not about males and females, courtship is not aboutpersuasion, fashion is not about beauty, and love is not about affec-tion. Below the surface of every banality and cliche there lies irony,cynicism, and prof...
If we rub a fabric too often, it will quickly grow threadbare; and Nobu’s words had rasped against me so much, I could no longer maintain that finely lacquered surface Mameha had always counseled me to hide behind.
Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface.
I did not know that mankind were suffering for want of gold. I have seen a little of it. I know that it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit. A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.
We are exploring together. We are cultivating a garden together, backs to the sun. The question is a hoe in our hands and we are digging beneath the hard and crusty surface to the rich humus of our lives.
Where do rumors come from, Sir Kofa?" i was truly curious to know the answer. "Where don't they come from? I suppose the majority of rumors are a combination of leaked information and the astouding imaginations of numerous storytellers. And, of cours...
I seem to walk on a transparent surface and see beneath me all the bones and wrecks and tentacles that will eventually claim me: in other words, old age, incapacity, loneliness, death of others & myself...
