Four of us,' said Morwen. The cats yowled. 'Yes, I know, and of course you're coming, but you can't carry a bucket of soapy water, so for the purposes of this discussion it doesn't matter,' she told them. The cats gave her an affronted look, turned t...
... we sat back and let the moon shine itself all over her, and we saw that Tia was full of light. Billy said that when we die the darkness leaves us. 'We're pure and perfect then,' he said, 'the way we are when we're born.
Unlike them, however, her path was not through daring deeds or the study of magic or the use of miraculous powers. She had been gifted with something almost as rare: an open and eager mind. She had the gift of watching and listening, the gift of taki...
He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure ...
Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point w...
It is a popular fact that nine-tenths of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary gray goo if its onl...
Outside, it feels like there is less standing between the Creator and us. There is a lingering visceral connection we can hear and see and smell, reminders of the bond between Creator and creation, like the mountain sage crushed up in the pocket of t...
What did I fear, and why? — I, to whom the night had been a more familiar face than that of man — I, in whom that element of hereditary superstition from which none of us is altogether free had given to solitude and darkness and silence only a mo...
It does not seem ever to have been satisfactorily answered why the two first operational atomic bombs were used — against the strongly voiced wishes of the leading physicists responsible for developing them — to destroy two cities instead of bein...
Prediction in a complex world is a chancy business. Every decision that a survival machine takes is a gamble, and it is the business of genes to program brains in advance so that on average they take decisions that pay off. The currency used in the c...
You see, my son, a city is all about how you look at it...We must learn to see it in many ways, so that when one of the ways of looking hurts us, we can take refuge in another way of looking. You must always love the city.
If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women: they do not read them in a true light: they misapprehend them, both for good and evil: their good woman i...
What was he thinking falling in love with her again, opening himself to another world of hurt when she left—knowing she would leave? She was a lawyer, working in the big city, used to fancy things, a fancy life. She didn’t fit in his world anymor...
Grace: I picked up my sweater from the floor and crawled back into bed. Shoving my pillow aside, I balled up the sweater to use instead. I fell asleep to the scent of my wolf. Pine needles, cold rain, earthy perfume, coarse bristles on my face. It wa...
It's natural. Nature is dark and light, birth and death. Everything and its opposite. And in nature there are predators and prey. The hunters and the hunted. The heartbreakers and the heartbroken. The beautiful thing is that Nature lets us choose whi...
It is not enough just to be good. We must be good for something. We must contribute good to the world. The world must be a better place for our presence. And the good that is in us must be spread to others. This is the measure of our civility.
The models we have, and the standards we are expected to maintain, come to us via heterosexuality as a normative state. Heterosexuality--whatever the current version of that concept happens to be--is unremarkable because it is the standard by which e...
Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt. In other words, a wish is a good place to start but then you have to get off your butt and make it happen. You have to pick up a quill and write your own damn ...
Ruthie started to cry at Julia's use of the word "hate," though Ruthie knew it was true, accurate. For a long time now it had been easier just to hate her sister. Easier to try to define the relationship with that simple emotion than to live with the...
Because we are always growing, life compounds and magnifies what is already in us. If you are miserable you grow in misery and if you are joyful you grow in joy. This makes self-love is the perfect soil from which to grow love.
Love is the most valuable gift we can give to another person. What we need to do is to open our heart and release our love to the world, to the people, to nature, to the animals, to the trees and to the sky – and this love will be returned a thousa...
