The more ardently I see humanity as a glorious abstract that must conform to my ideal of how the world should be, the harder it is for me to love the person on the other side of the picket line who is holding up progress. I can love the downtrodden i...
Rest in Peace?’ Why that phrase? That’s the most ridiculous phrase I’ve ever heard! You die, and they say ‘Rest in Peace!’ …Why would one need to ‘rest’ when they’re dead?! I spent thousands of years of world history resting. While ...
It was radicals like you and your father that hijacked your faith, hijacked a few planes, and made thousands of children orphans in a single day. You pretend my country beats you because you are poor, but you ignore that it was people of your faith t...
There is no stillness, only change. Yesterday’s here is not today’s here. Yesterday’s here is somewhere in Russia, in a wilderness in Canada, a deep blue nowhere out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It’s behind the sun, it’s in deep spa...
All that matters is the way he’s angling my face up to his, thumb and forefinger still on my jaw and my chin. It makes me think of someone taking a drink, only the drink in question is my lips. He wants to taste me there, and oh, that’s exactly w...
It was a wonderful thing to think for how many thousands of years the dead orb above and the dead city below had gazed thus upon each other, and in the utter solitude of space poured forth each to each the tale of their lost life and long-departed gl...
The world population is nearing seven billion. John Travolta and Farrah Fawcett didn’t procreate and produce all seven thousand million of us. Audrey Hepburn and Burt Lancaster didn’t personally populate the world. Almost every child that was eve...
Rumors had their own classic epidemiology. Each started with a single germinating event. Information spread from that point, mutating and interbreeding—a conical mass of threads, expanding into the future from the apex of their common birthplace. E...
No Self stands alone. Behind it stretches an immense chain of physical and - as a special class within the whole - mental events, to which it belongs as a reacting member and which it carries on. Through the condition at any moment of its somatic, es...
The campus, an academy of trees, under which some hand, the wind's I guess, had scattered the pale light of thousands of spring beauties, petals stained with pink veins; secret, blooming for themselves. We sat among them. Your long fingers, thin body...
Ally turned her attention back to Brian Byrne. "So what do you do for a living when you're not searching out your roots?" "Have sex with thousands of women." He slanted her a grin that would've knocked her off her feet if she wasn't already laid out ...
I believe the way to write a good play is to convince yourself it is easy to do--then go ahead and do it with ease. Don't maul, don't suffer, don't groan till the first draft is finished. A play is a pheonix and it dies a thousand deaths. Usually at ...
I feel like, I was going somehow with my life, holding myself together and then these blasts happened, and then suddenly I was paralyzed. I was not able to move, or to even hold myself intact. As if like I was fallen into this unconscious state, of e...
Hold out your hands to feel the luxury of sunbeams. Press the soft blossoms against your cheek, and finger their graces of form, their delicate mutability of shape, their pliancy and freshness. Expose your face to the aerial floods that sweep the hea...
Few religions are definite about the size of Heaven, but on the planet Earth the Book of Revelation (ch. XXI, v.16) gives it as a cube 12,000 furlongs on a side. This is somewhat less than 500,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic feet. Even allowing that th...
He'd only been gone two seconds, but the room got brighter when they were together, as if they were two elements that became brilliant in proximity. At Sam's clumsy efforts to carry the vacuum, Grace smiled a new smile that I thought only he ever got...
Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the earth much? Have you practis'd so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poe...
If the Pentateuch is not inspired in its astronomy, geology, geography, history or philosophy, if it is not inspired concerning slavery, polygamy, war, law, religious or political liberty, or the rights of men, women and children, what is it inspired...
Because men are sentimental over women they will throw away military advantages, and hesitate and weigh the chances of failure when attack is their best or only hope, and lose their opportunity because they "have to think of the women and children". ...
We all think we understand each other,' Kin heard Silver say. 'We eat together, we trade, many of us pride ourselves on having alien friends - but all this is only possible, only possible, Kin, because we do not fully comprehend the other. You've stu...
A T-shirt is a T-shirt. Spending hundreds of dollars on it doesn't elevate it. He was under-dressed, even if his casual outfit did cost more than my suit and tie. I once had another fashion victim tell me, 'This T-shirt cost twelve thousand dollars!'...