After all these years, his best friend is malaria. Even on the brink of an Alaska summer, it comes calling: a bone-deep chill one night, a ministry of sweat the next. Calling him back to old battles.
Lured by the wilderness, and by the chance of spotting rare desert elephants, a few intrepid tourists make their way to the Skeleton Coast each year. It's just about as remote as any tourist destination on earth, but one that pays fabulous dividends.
All thought usually reached the public after thirty years in some such form: The man on the street heard the conclusions of some dead genius through someone else's clever paradoxes and didactic epigrams.
She bought seeds and raided nurseries and mulched and composted and spent full days with her hands full of earth, coaxing life our of the dry, dull grass my father had spent years pushing a mower over.
If somebody wanted me dead, I’d try to convince them to wait 25 years, for technology to arrive, so they can go kill my clone. It’s a win-win for me and them, but not for my other me.
I know that man started animal husbandry thousands of years ago, and I think it’s disgusting. Men and animals should never be allowed to marry. Or have sex. And maybe not even engage in necking, unless it’s a man and a giraffe.
He told me he had a wife and daughter, and then he showed me a picture of an 8-year-old girl, to which I said, “Don’t you think she’s a bit too young to be a wife and mother?” Fucking pedophiles.
They envy your youth. You two are like exotic creatures from the land of the young.’ I’ve never understood all that these-are-the-best-years-of-your-life crap. If this is as good as it gets then I might as well quit now. Let me get to the shimmer...
The pathway traced with blood and tears, and dust of all our father's dead, Whose backward footsteps, wandering, red, Fade to the mist of nameless years. (“The Testimony of the Suns”)
However, at fourteen years old, she didn’t understand that all those terrible troubles the heroines in her books went through in real life hurt. That the , Trials and tribulations to prove your love were exactly that, trials and tribulations.
I am a divorced child, of divided, uncertain background. Within this division I - supposed fruit of their love - no longer exist. It happened nearly forty years ago, yet to me nothing is sadder than my parents' divorce.
I'm talking about doing something good for mankind. Imagine how awesome everyone would feel if they knew all that holy stuff was real." -Gregori "Stuff? Four years of giving sermons, and that what I get back? Holy stuff?
For two years, she and Cassie had been inseparable. And then one night, Cassie had disappeared from her bed. In her place, her abductor had left his calling card, a macabre nursery rhyme. Cassie had never come home.
One ought to have some sort of transcendent realization that the world exists because the gods are trapped in the same abyss you've occupied for three years. It should be inspiring or comforting or, I don't know, cathartic.
I have lived through an eventful year, yet understand no more of it than a babe in arms. Of all the people of this town I am the one least fitted to write a memorial. Better the blacksmith with his cries of rage and woe.
How curious it was, [...], that we humans had taken millions of year to crawl up out of the swamps and yet, within minutes of death, we were already tobogganing back down the slope.
Living like an empty shell is not really living, no matter how many years it may go on. The heart and flesh of an empty shell give birth to nothing more than the life of an empty shell.
Trouble is we end up being worse at saying things well. It's got to be an inborn fault. Naturally, everyone's got faults. My biggest fault is that the faults i was born with grow bigger each year.
Babbage had most of this system sketched out by 1837, but the first true computer to use this programmable architecture didn’t appear for more than a hundred years.
Over the years I've received thousands of e-mails looking for guidance. Some have real problems; some talk about monkeys and poo--though those people may also have real problems.
I'm a century old, an impossible age, and my brain has no anchor in the present. Instead it drifts, nearly always to the same shore. Today, as most days, it is 1962. The year I discovered love.
