No more fear of hunger. A new kind of freedom. But what then ... what? What would my life be like on a daily basis? Most of it has been consumed with the acquisition of food. Take that away and I'm not really sure who I am, what my identity is. The i...
And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place....
Since Mom wasn't exactly the most useful person in the world, one lesson I learned at an early age was how to get things done, and this was a source of both amazement and concern for Mom, who considered my behavior unladylike but also counted on me. ...
Mathias shrugged. After all, a criminal lawyer is not concerned with facts. He is concerned with probabilities. It is the novelist who is concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular man did do on a particular occasion: the lawyer d...
For a moment he wondered, again, if he should just give it all up. Perhaps he should go back to Italy, back to his hiding place. What made him think that he could rejoin the world of daylight? But he was tired of living in shadows. He was tired of th...
A brick could make everything better for me. Now, if I could only find a way to get my hands on one. But it’s a silly dream, because I don’t have the ambition to get out from under my blanket and go out and grab the very thing I most desire.
it's through the simple things in life, through its games, when our minds mature the most and we grow knowledgeable. It's also when the cloth masks of our outer, false personalities are torn asunder, and we are able to see every last blemish of a man...
True vampires that want to build a strong family does not go around turning people just because they want to. But even the most sensible of vampire can be tempted by beauty. When you come across someone whose beauty seems to be made of the stars them...
The bad thing is that most people don`t decide to react before experiencing pain, because options still exist. Only when life deprives us of options do we decide to conquer those unimaginable things.
Sienna swallowed down her hurt and added it to the growing infestation of pain placed it in that beating glass jar of hers, concealed it shut and buried it deep under the filth and grime of her soul that no one cared to dig through. She didn’t blam...
The ritual worked. That is the most ghastly thing. I hold no particular brief for the rationality of the world, but that this vile obscenity should actually have the power to bring back the dead seems to me not merely a sign that the world is not rat...
I will simply die, as you will simply die, when our hearts stop beating. And instead of the fires of Hell or the clouds of Heaven, there will be a chorus of hungry worms or fish, depending on how we go. Isn’t that what really terrifies you most of ...
When you have dogs, you witness their uncomplaining acceptance of suffering, their bright desire to make the most of life in spite of the limitations of age and disease, their calm awareness of the approaching end when their final hours come. They ac...
Of course, in Los Angeles, is based on driving, even the killings. In New York, most people don't have cars, so if you want to kill a person, you have to take the subway to their house. And sometimes on the way, the train is delayed and you get impat...
What a storyteller does is *see* more than most of us. We say he's making up his stories, but he—or better yet, *she*—watches more carefully, and then tells us what we would have seen ourselves if we'd just stopped to look." -Leah said—to Nadin...
Any number of celebrities are dogged by "gay rumors" because we cannot quite place them into a given category. We act like placing these people in categories will have some impact on our lives, or that creating these categories is our responsibility,...
I try to learn better, do better. I have no idea how I got to be the one at the front of the classroom, the one who gets to be in charge of things. Most of the time, I feel like the kid who gets to sit at the adult table for the first time at Thanksg...
As girls, we will do anything for the person whom we love. We will scale buildings in the rain or run through fire if it means saving our love’s life. There is absolutely nothing more life altering that the fire burning inside of our souls for the ...
I realized that most times it’s not the big things along my spiritual journey that tempt me to get off track. It’s a culmination of small daily aggravations I know God could fix but doesn’t. But what if instead of seeing these aggravations as i...
All this, sadly enough, is truer of the more educated, higher-income, professional families. It is here that the competition is the greatest, the expectations most elevated. If the boy would be happier as a telephone linesman or a forest ranger, he i...
Strange, isn't it,' mused Glokta as he watched him struggle for air. 'Big men, small men, thin men, fat men, clever men, stupid men, they all respond the same to a fist in the guts. One minute you think you're the most powerful man in the world. The ...