. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public ...
If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the unive...
The only difference between you today and a year from now are the people you know and what you have learned.
I’d actually questioned my sanity, wondered if this was it: the substandard past few years had finally led to a mental break with reality, and now, floodgates open, there’d be no limit to the fiends I’d encounter. They’d simply crawl out of m...
You die." Thad's voice was heavy; the fire was gone. "It's like everyone has a personal window of time that the gateway to Nil stays open for them. It's always one year. Exactly three hundred sixty-five days. If you miss that window, you're done.
After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dus...
It seemed that our family had been on this land for thousands of years; that we had sprung from the earth, born of its flesh like a tree or a flower, deep-rooted, not by our feet, but by our hearts.
The Solarians have given up something mankind has had for a million years; something worth more than atomic power, cities, agriculture, tools, fire, everything; because it's something that made everything possible (...) The tribe, sir. Cooperation be...
A table for TONIGHT should certainly have been booked years before-perhaps, it was implied, by Richard's parents. A table for TONIGHT was impossible: if the pope, the prime minister, and the president of France arrived this evening without a confirme...
He remembered a conversation he'd once had with a Chief Constable some years back, when he asked the Chief if in his experience he believed there was such a thing as the 'perfect murder'. The Chief had replied that there was. 'It's the one we never h...
All those years thinking I was saved and had said my yes to God, but was really living the no.
I need a tube-shaped bathtub, to play the tuba in. I make love like I make music—in a shower that’s in a phone booth that’s in 1981, the year before I was born.
You can’t buy love, it’s true. However, I am offering mine for rent. Buy one year and get the next six months at half price.
I asked what year the car was that was sitting in the driveway, but what I meant was how long had it been parked there. If it’s been there since 1982, I’ve been in love longer than it is wide.
We made love like ten minutes ago. I still remember it vividly, even though our brief sexual encounter took place ten years ago.
I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this--I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.
When I moved, I unearthed the diaries I kept for ten years. I sat and went through them and they were a worthless burden to own. People will say it's tragic I threw them out, but I know it isn't.
The tears were back, stinging just behind my eyes. There was blood all over my penguins. I didn't give a damn about the walls and carpet. They could be replaced, but I'd collected those damned stuffed toys over years.
There is a legitimate argument over whether the death penalty effectively deters violent crime, although my personal observation is that not one of the criminals who have been executed over the years has ever killed again.
A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.
It costs about the same to house a maximum-security young adult prisoner for a year as it does to send his law-abiding counterpart to Harvard.
