We've inherited many ideas about writing that emerged in the eighteenth century, especially an interest in literature as both an expression and an exploration of the self. This development part of what distinguishes the "modern" from the "early mo...
I recall once seeing a commentary advertised as having been written in prison without recourse to other commentaries and by reliance on the Holy Spirit alone. I doubt whether those last two phrases are complementary. If God has set teachers in the ch...
So I thought I’d feel different afterward, after the visible neon sign proclaiming 'virgin' had blinked out on my forehead. I’d spent years obessessing about it, so it seemed like somthing should have changed. Maybe it would have if I’d still b...
The funny thing about my procrastination was that I was almost done with the screenplay. I was like a person who had fought dragons and lost limbs and crawled through swamps and now, finally, the castle was visible. I could see tiny children waving f...
Megan noisily sucked in air for a scream that froze in her lungs. The cat stood in front of the open fire escape window, tail twitching, eyes focused intently on her face. Cursing inwardly at the stupidity of leaving the window open even a little bit...
She had come to that state where the horror of the universe and its smallness are both visible at the same time—the twilight of the double vision in which so many elderly people are involved. If this world is not to our taste, well, at all events, ...
Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and wanin...
When man is finally able to see himself and the world around him with clear cognition, he finds a picture far more pleasant. Visible in unmistakable clarity and devastating detail is man’s failure to be what he might be and his misuse of his world....
My mother's outh drops. 'Emmy...don't say those things Emmy. Remember, we don't talk about those things.' 'Yes Mom. I remember. That's why I'm here, looking like this.' An orderly knocks on the door and announces that visiting time is over. My mother...
Sexual conflict occurs when one mating partner has an opportunity to increase its fitness at a cost to the other partner. On a genetic level, most sexual conflicts are interlocus conflicts that mainly concern the outcome of male-female interactions a...
God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves. You were speaking of the Last Judgement. Allow me to laugh respectfully. I shall wait for it resolutely, for I have known what is worse, the judgement of men....
Though I did not have the statistics, just observing the number of women on the streets during peak hours dressed for work, it was obvious that a greater percentage of women in Vanni went to work outside the home. There were also more women in civili...
The water you kids were playing in, he said, had probably been to Africa and the North Pole. Genghis Khan or Saint Peter or even Jesus may have drunk it. Cleopatra might have bathed in it. Crazy Horse might have watered his pony with it. Sometimes wa...
I can fairly say it was the first time in my new life that I really wished I wasn't supernatural: if I had been human the pain would have stopped because I would be dead. II can only describe it as what a person would feel if he somehow, by some terr...
This was different. It had synths droning and sending saltwater waves under my feet. It had drumbeats bursting like fireworks, rumbling the furniture out of place, and then a crazy, irregular, disharmonious, spiral crescendo of pure electric noise, l...
Tragedy's language stresses that whatever is within us is obscure, many faceted, impossible to see. Performance gave this question of what is within a physical force. The spectators were far away from the performers, on that hill above the theatre. A...
What I aim to do is not so much learn the names of the shreds of creation that flourish in this valley, but to keep myself open to their meanings, which is to try to impress myself at all times with the fullest possible force of their very reality. I...
Christian hope frees us to act hopefully in the world. It enables us to act humbly and patiently, tackling visible injustices in the world around us without needing to be assured that our skill and our effort will somehow rid the world of injustice a...
Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors. The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside. Sure of my life and death, I observe the ambitious and would like to understand them. Their day is greedy as a lariat in the ai...
Lefebvre summarises this march of clock-time through society and nature (1991: 95–6). He argues that the lived time experienced in and through nature has gradually disappeared. Time is no longer something that is visible and inscribed within space....
As she felt his fangs against her neck, she was in another world. There was screaming. A woman was somewhere in agony. Everything was black, and the tormented scream was overwhelming, echoing through the emptiness. After the screaming subsided, there...
