I saw [Chennai]. It had the usual Indian elements like autos, packed public buses, hassled traffic cops and tiny shops that sold groceries, fruits, utensils, clothes or novelty items. However, it did feel different. First, the sign in every shop was ...
I am above the forest region, amongst grand rocks & such a torrent as you see in Salvator Rosa's paintings vegetation all a scrub of rhodos. with Pines below me as thick & bad to get through as our Fuegian Fagi on the hill tops, & except the towering...
Percy and Hedge lay on the deck, looking exhausted. Hedge was missing his shoes. He grinned at the sky, muttering, “Awesome. Awesome.” Percy was covered in nicks and scratches, like he’d jumped through a window. He didn’t say anything but he ...
Dinner was wonderful. There was a joint of beef, with roast potatoes, golden-crisp on the outside and soft and white inside, buttered greens I did not recognize, although I think now that they might have been nettles, toasted carrots all blackened an...
They had gathered at Eastcheap to wait. At this time of day, the marketplace ought to have been thronged with people looking for bargains, moving from stall to stall, examining the fresh fish, choosing the plumpest hens, buying candles and pepper and...
I myself have dreamed up a structure intermediate between Dyson spheres and planets. Build a ring 93 million miles in radius - one Earth orbit - around the sun. If we have the mass of Jupiter to work with, and if we make it a thousand miles wide, we ...
Since the moment when, at the sight of his beloved and dying brother, Levin for the first time looked at the questions of life and death in the light of the new convictions, as he called them, which between the ages of twenty and thirty-four had impe...
Zampanò: [reciting his act by rote before a crowd] Here we have a piece of chain that is a quarter of an inch thick. It is made of crude iron, stronger than steel. With the simple expansion of my pectoral muscles, or chest, that is, I'll break the h...
Westley: Where am I? The Albino: [raspy voice] The Pit of Despair! Don't even think... [clears throat] The Albino: ... don't even think about trying to escape. The chains are far too thick. Don't dream of being rescued, either; the only way in is sec...
Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour--landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over h...
She loved sinking into her bed on evenings like this, but apparently she shouldn't, because it worried her aunts, who thought she ought to be out dancing. It worried her a little bit, too, because what if they were right, and because sometimes a grea...
She had been struck by the figure of a woman's back in a mirror. She stopped and looked. The dress the figure wore was the color called ashes of roses, and Ada stood, held in place by a sharp stitch of envy or th woman's dress and the fine shape of h...
Love is not first a feeling. Though the feelings come later and grow thick in the basic loam of love, they don't constitute the sum and substance of love. Love is doing whatever good God says you must do for another, to please God, whether (at first)...
Asita wasn’t hungry this day, however. There were other ways to keep the prana, or life current, going. If he did visit the demon loka, it would take enormous prana to sustain his body. There would be no air for his lungs to breathe among the demon...
Do I have to give you hair torture to get it out of you?” What is ? From the light in her eyes and the jaunty uptick of her mouth, I had a sense it would be pleasurable. “Do what you must.” In a dash, she pinned my wrists above my head. Her hea...
A fight like this was stunning, revealing not just how much he was on the lookout for enemies, but how she too was unable to abandon argument which escalated into rage. Neither of them would back off, they held bitterly to principles. Can't you toler...
Look at that," he said. "How the ink bleeds." He loved the way it looked, to write on a thick pillow of the pad, the way the thicker width of paper underneath was softer and allowed for a more cushiony interface between pen and surface, which meant m...
In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which are frowning at you from t...
The enemy came towards us thick as mercury poured into a channel; a simmering tide oozing from the furnace of the risen sun into the pass below us. I felt Syrion tighten his grip on the banner haft, we were that close, that closely knit. On my left, ...
This time Simone did not smile at all. "I cannot tell that to you, child. This is a secret I am not allowed to talk about. I only hope that you will know how to follow the true and right path. And now, farewell!" She turned around and walked away bet...
I think it's obvious if you're wanted here or not." "Daemon," hissed Dee, her cheeks red. She turned to me, tears in her eyes. "He's not being serious." "Are you being serious, Daemon?" Ash turned in his lap, head cocked to the side. My heart was alr...
