The next thing Jordana says makes me realize that it's too late to save her. "I've noticed that when you light a match, the flame is the same shape as a falling tear." She's been sensitized, turned gooey in the middle. I saw it happening and I didn't...
Heart turned to me, his face thoughtful. “Yesterday morning. Yes, that means that Daphne hadn’t been home for two days before that.” He smiled at me. “You were supposed to be the Alpha’s eye candy.” Adam laughed. “What?�...
Well, you've finally got a license to kill. It's about time. " I turned and met the amused eyes of Christian Ozera, a onetime annoyance who'd become a good friend. So good, in fact, that in my joyous zeal, I reached out and hugged him--something he c...
I'll stay away from you and you'll stay away from me. I'm already over this insignificant, puny, inconsequential attraction. I don't even remember kissing you." They had reached the cluster of trees in front of the courtyard leading to Frances Cather...
It was getting harder, however. American magazines still looked shiny and lively, but by the early 1960s, writers like Flora were sensing trouble. With television's exploding popularity, more and more people were staring at screens instead of turning...
Imagine saying to somebody that you have a life-threatening illness, such as cancer, and being told to pull yourself together or get over it. Imagine being terribly ill and too afraid to tell anyone lest it destroys your career. Imagine being admitte...
This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents--were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which...
Another principle that I believe can be justified by scientific evidence so far is that nobody is going to emigrate from this planet not ever....It will be far cheaper, and entail no risk to human life, to explore space with robots. The technology is...
When now we turn and look five miles above, there on the edge of town are five houses of prostitutes,—two of blacks and three of whites; and in one of the houses of the whites a worthless black boy was harbored too openly two years ago; so he was h...
Now that you're a Skinny Bitch, don't turn into a skinny bitch. We conceived of the title, Skinny Bitch, to get attention and sell books.... But we are not bitches, and we have no desire to promote bitchiness. There is nothing uglier than a pretty wo...
He lived like a devil and died like a saint. Life is paradoxical, but I believe that I could also be the person I am today, if life would have cut me with happiness, instead of pain. I would be the same. I didn’t need the pain to grow, or be who I ...
Life is not a straight line leading from one blessing to the next and then finally to heaven. Life is a winding and troubled road. Switchback after switchback. And the point of biblical stories like Joseph and Job and Esther and Ruth is to help us fe...
Jobs also used the meetings to enforce focus. At Robert Friedland's farm, his job had been to prune the apple trees so that they would stay strong, and that became a metaphor for his pruning at Apple. Instead of encouraging each group to let product ...
Now he had chanced on one of he standard hard-on sessions of the shower, as on both sides of him and across the room three queens sported horizontal members which they turned around from time to time to conceal or display, barely exchanging looks as ...
What I mean is that those thoughts, they're human. And just because you turn out differently than everyone's imagined you would doesn't mean that you've failed in some way. A kid who gets teased in one school might move to a different one, and be the...
Before you either turn away in disgust or wink knowingly at one another, you should know that the artist insists that this is a picture about love. Filial love. The old man has been condemned by the Roman senate to die of hunger, and his daughter has...
One is seduced and battered in turn. The result is presumably wisdom. Wisdom! We are clinging to life like lizards. Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to dwell among them only? I am referring to certain lan...
Wonder why we can do this,' he called out with his mind. The mental effort of speaking to her was already straining—he felt a headache forming like a bulge in his brain. 'Maybe we were lovers,' Teresa said. Thomas tripped and crashed to the ground....
Strip by strip the lash carved into Grace's shuddering flesh. My tears were falling by then, heavy drops, joining in the leaf dust with the blood that had begun to trickle from the table. My limbs were so weak that I could not even raise a hand to wi...
I wonder where he lies. Wedged under a rock, with a thousand small mouths already sucking on his spongy flesh. Or floating still, on and down, on and down, to wider, calmer reaches of the river. I see them gathering: the drowned, the shot. Their hand...
Scientific theories are tested every time someone makes an observation or conducts an experiment, so it is misleading to think of science as an edifice, built on foundations. Rather, scientific knowledge is more like a web. The difference couldn’t ...