A monster crosses over into the everyday world. The mortals struggle and show great courage, but it’s no use. The monster kills first the guilty, then the innocent, until finally only one remains. The Last Boy, the Last Girl. There is a final battl...
As the chapters took shape, a change came over her. It was the double-sided recognition that this book, the last that she would write, might achieve esteem and success equal to her great novel, but that its emotional heart would lie in her own unhapp...
Love is a figment of our imagination; becoming whatever we wish it to be. We customized our feelings to control love, resembling a wind being tossed about whichever way it suits us. Love is a game for the fittest, if you are weak at heart it will des...
Love is a devoted madness while marriage is a responsibility. But then it is possible to be devotedly mad and responsible at the same time, yes it is. And so this is how we should begin to see marriage: as it is, for what it is! Marriage needs to cea...
In Book III, which deals with morals, I have also passed over some things but for a different reason. Ever since I served as an infantryman in the First World War, I have had a great dislike of people who, themselves in ease and safety, issue exhorta...
I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I th...
I've tried reading the Bible. I never make it past all the talk about the firmament. The firmament is the thing, on Day 1 or 2, that divides the waters from the waters. Here you have the firmament. Next to the firmament, the waters. Stay with the wat...
Victor Laszlo: I know a good deal more about you than you suspect. I know, for instance, that you're in love with a woman. It is perhaps a strange circumstance that we both should be in love with the same woman. The first evening I came to this café...
Andrew Largeman: What could be ruder than talking about someone else who died when you're in the act of burying a close friend? Sam: Well, what should we do? Andrew Largeman: I don't know. I've only been to one of these things. You appear to be the e...
Harry Potter: First we've got to find a place to practice where Umbridge won't find out. Ginny Weasley: The Shrieking Shack? Harry Potter: It's too small. Hermione Granger: The Forbidden Forest? Ron Weasley: Not bloody likely! Ginny Weasley: Harry, w...
Merlin: Congratulations on completing your first task. Charlie, Roxy, well done. For those of you who are still confused, if you can get a breathing tube through the U-bend of a toilet, you have an unlimited air supply. Simple physics... worth rememb...
I had more to say,” Sin said, still looking frustrated. “But it doesn’t come out right when I try. I always say the wrong things.” Boyd nodded but he was so caught by their proximity, by the green of Sin’s eyes, that at first he struggled w...
When { and and the Göttingen theoretical physicists} first discovered matrix mechanics they were having, of course, the same kind of trouble that everybody else had in trying to solve problems and to manipulate and to really do things with matrices....
Today, specific travel attitudes and methodologies are as carefully calibrated as attire worn on a first date. Which is absurd. It's absurd when it means visiting only the most famous cities and landmarks, strictly hewing to the instructions of the l...
The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.
Want a thing long enough, and you don't.
A fool by chance may say a wise thing.
From trivial things great arguments often arise.
When things go well it is easy to advise.
He who dispraises a thing wants to buy it.
The best thing about a man is his dog.
