The recruiter didn't bother to introduce himself when Alumbaugh extended his hand. Instead, he turned to Aliotti and said: "He's not six-foot-one." Nice to meet you, too, Alumbaugh thought.
The Fool held his breath. On long nights on the hard flagstones he had dreamed of women like her. Although, if he really thought about it, not much like her; they were better endowed around the chest, their noses weren’t so red and pointed, and the...
door I thought about life and how it resembled a ladder. Do you ever feel that way? Like life is one big uphill climb and there are always more people and circumstances tripping us and trying to pull us back down the ladder, while very, very few peop...
Most of the time I am sunk in thought, but at some point on each walk there comes a moment when I look up and notice, with a kind of first-time astonishment, the amazing complex delicacy of the words, the casual ease with which elemental things come ...
Maybe he hadn't thought the war through. It had seemed like simple fun when he had first pictured it, with a glorious beginning, a difficult but valor-filled middle, and a victorious end. He hadn't accounted for the fact that there might not be much ...
Sean at sixteen thought 'Rexecutioner's Dream' was the greatest thing he'd ever heard, something so strange and different it seemed like a message from another realm. It had cover art, but the art was glued onto the inner sleeve of a standard-issue b...
To be taught to read—what is the use of that, if you know not whether what you read is false or true? To be taught to write or to speak—but what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think—nay, what is the use of b...
Too bad I didn't know you back then, I would have come and rescued you." Like he was Prince Charming or something. Which he is, in a way, because he rescued me from the simple, uncomplicated life I thought I liked until I realized how much I was miss...
I had a dream about you, you invited me shopping and I was so excited at the thought we were having a "day date" after we entered the mall you had dropped your wallet and bent down to pick it up, I noticed you were wearing a thong. I realized then th...
I had a dream about you. You said you wanted to grow your hair long, and I wondered how long long is. I thought the Nile river is long, so that’s probably what you meant. I offered to build a Pyramid on your shoulder, and you offered me tax exempt ...
But spontaneity is not by any means a blind, disorderly urge, a mere power of caprice. A philosophy restricted to the alternatives of conventional language has no way of conceiving an intelligence which does not work according to plan, according to a...
Ciba: "I thought you were supposed to be some big brave war hero. What about that goddamn gold star you polish every night?" Natalya: "You know what this shiny piece of tin is, you fucking space cadet? It's the way stupid boys trick other stupid boys...
Information wants to be free.' So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said it first. I say that information doesn't deserve to be free. Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were al...
A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does so according to principles we already understand. Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary in...
What people don't understand when you've already been a suicide and pulled through is that after the sadness comes fear: Where is my mind going with this? I don't want to die. I do not want to die. When you don't have so much control over your own th...
When I opened the last [401k] statement, I jumped out of the window. True, it was the kitchen window and I only fell two feet, so the whole scene lacked drama, but I thought that was the required reaction to extreme financial turmoil in America. And ...
I quickly dropped my hands and changed the subject. "So those two who visited me the other night. Who were they?" I asked. He smiled, knowingly. "Ares and Aphrodite." Of course, I thought. In fact, I think I had already sort of figured that out. Alth...
She looked up from closing it to find Jace watching her through hooded eyes. “And one last thing,” he said. He reached over and pulled the sparking pins out of her hair, so that it fell in warm heavy curls down her neck. The sensation of hair tic...
And you would know so much about women, locked up in your castle." "Locked up with eight wives. And sometimes I make house calls for my bargainers. There's many a lovely woman desperate enough to bargain with me." This idea had never occurred to me b...
Jace's eyes sparkled, but he said calmly, "Not at all. the Silent Brothers can help her retrieve her memories." "You hate the Silent Brothers," protested Isabelle. "I don't hate them," said Jace candidly."I'm afraid of them. It's not the same thing."...
When he thought of her, it rather amazed him, that he had let that girl with her violin go. Now, of course, he saw that her self-effacing proposal was quite irrelevant. All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there ...
