Nay, in many cases open denials of prayer prove the most excellent answers, and God's not hearing us is the most signal audience. Therefore at the foot of every prayer subscribe "thy will be done," and thou shalt enjoy preventing mercies that thou ne...
And next time we hear someone saying something like, 'We are pursuing this strategy because other strategies, when we had considered them, we concluded that, in terms of overall effectiveness, they were not sound strategies, which is why we enacted t...
...his condition in Roanoke is a strong testament that lassitude, indifference and the peculiarities of his thought were primarily the consequences of his illness and not of the early attempts to treat it. The popular view that anti-psychotics were c...
In a culture that is becoming ever more story-stupid, in which a representative of the Coca-Cola company can, with a straight face, pronounce, as he donates a collection of archival Coca-Cola commercials to the Library of Congress, that 'Coca-Cola ha...
I had uncovered a widely held but overlooked attachment: our attachment to the view that every problem must have a solution. We delude ourselves that we can think our way out of a problem or we see it as a matter of finding the right person to advise...
I phoned the Admiral back. 'It's no use, Admiral, the French speak nothing but French.' There was a short pause on the end of the line then his voice rattled into life like a sabre. 'They're lying, Tim!' 'What?' 'The French Navy must by law speak Eng...
To all you sensitive sallys out there who spend your time scribing angry letters, I have great news: Scientific models show that in the not-too-distant future, all the races will become so completely interbred that humanity will have a monolithic car...
Dear Natasha, It's the middle of the night. I can't sleep. Thoughts are creeping through my head like darkness slips around the bodies of sky scrapers in every city we've ever been to. From the bottom up, suffocating the life on the street first and ...
When he’d woken that morning to find her gone, he’d used the time alone to clean himself up in every sense of the word. Decisions about his future had been part of it, but there'd been more, too. Because in all the time they’d known one another...
Through our own creative experience we came to know that the real tradition in art is not housed only in museums and art galleries and in great works of art; it is innate in us and can be galvanized into activity by the power of creative endeavor in ...
And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion (even more mysterious to us than it had been to the very first thinkers in their pale olive gloves) by the fusion of two mysteries, or rat...
What do you know? This is where it all began,” he said. “Began?” “This is exactly where I was when I wanted to kiss you,” he whispered, his lips brushing along my neck causing me to melt under his touch. “So bad.” “Except this time th...
I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes. After that I liked jazz m...
I'm taking inorganic chem and physics not because I want to but because I have to. Not every doctor wants to be a scientist. Some of us just want to take care of sick people. I can't help thinking that medicine is more closely aligned to the humaniti...
He was welcome everywhere he went, and was well-aware of his inability to tolerate solitude. He felt no inclination to be alone and avoided it as far as possible; he didn't really want to become any better acquainted with himself. He knew that if he ...
I feel guilty because for a long time I didn't allow myself a television, and I used to drop that fact in conversation to impress people. I thought it made me sound dignified. A couple of years ago, however, I visited a church in the suburbs and ther...
The sky is deep, the sky is dark. The light of the stars is o damn stark/When I look up, I fill with fear, if all we have is what lies here, this lonely world, this troubled place, then cold dead stars and empty space...Well, I see no reason to perse...
He (Comings) has in the past performed successful energy-converting experiments, creating a ringing resonance by injecting certain frequencies into piezo-electric crystals. When the crystal was in resonance with the plenum of space, the power output ...
No it was my choice. It's what I wanted to do. And I knew they'd probably send me to Iraq. It's not like anybody lied to me." She groans. "Billy, all these mofos ever do is lie. You think if they halfway told the truth we'd even be in a fucking war? ...
We show hospitality to strangers not merely because they need it, but because we need it, too. The stranger at the door is the living symbol and memory that we are all strangers here. This is not our house, our table, our food, our lodging; this is G...
The races are like America's children. White people are the firstborn, so they were Dad's favorite. Black people are the second kids, the abused ones, so they still hate Dad. Latinos are the third, caught in the middle and always trying to make peace...
