The man who did the shooting was a civilian, Peter Kakhovsky, a gifted intellectual of extreme purity of motive in whom the conviction of the necessity of regicide burned with a gem-like flame. Determined to kill, expecting to die, this brilliant and...
When her grandchildren would whine with words resembling 'I'm hungry', my Oma would tenderly correct us with 'No, you feel like eating' which to me seemed be the same thing. Oma had survived Amsterdam during WW1 and truly knew what hunger was. It is ...
Have you ever had so much to say that your mouth closed up tight struggling to harness the nuclear force coalescing within your words? Have you ever had so many thoughts churning inside you that you didn’t dare let them escape in case they blew you...
She dabbed at the surface of the water with one paw, and the moon fluttered like silver wings before settling again as the water stilled. Letting out a faint mrrow of wonder, Half Moon dabbed again and again. However often she disturbed the surface, ...
If careful attention is paid to the reality, we will see clearly, the real shortage is of the right skills, rather than of jobs. If the right skills are developed, the right start-ups and other enterprises will emerge and provide the jobs needed. It�...
[M]any people believe that memory works like a recording device. You just record the information, then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or identify images. But decades of work in psychology has shown that this just is...
Writers write because they're writers. Because their imaginations boil up inside of them, waiting to overflow into the written word. Ordinary people have little capacity for unyielding imagination, whereas the natural-born writer can do little but yi...
Love is wise; hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live ...
We needed a refrigerator for our new place and I've never bought a refrigerator my whole life. I went into the appliance store, there's like 900 of 'em lined up, there's a salesman there. What's this guy supposed to say about refrigerators? "Well you...
You ask me if I do not think that men are strange beings - I do indeed, I have often thought so - and I think too that the mode of bringing them up is strange, they are not half sufficiently guarded from temptation - Girls are protected as if they we...
I have checked our teleportation technology," Tridax said. "There was no sign of sabotage. You are a liar." "Well, no one ever said Makuta were observant," said Vezon, "How could you be so sure? Suppose I sabotaged it myself using my incredible power...
I know a little bit about trying to do the right thing and fucking up completely." I added. "You talking about mom?" Ben said "I was talking about me." "You could have been talking about all of us. Ben pressed his hand against the glass and my brothe...
My youngest brother had a wonderful schtick from some time in high school, through to graduating medicine. He had a card in his wallet that read, ‘If I am found with amnesia, please give me the following books to read …’ And it listed half a do...
Another very good test some readers may want to look up, which we do not have space to describe here, is the Casimir effect, where forces between metal plates in empty space are modified by the presence of virtual particles. Thus virtual particles ar...
You know something, it’s not easy to break out of your comfort zone. People will tear you down, tell you you shouldn’t have bothered in the first place. But let me tell you something, there’s not much of a difference between a stadium full with...
A poem must be authentic. It could be flowery, it could have the most brilliant metaphor, it could be bursting with onomatopoeia and alliteration, assonance and consonance, hyperbole and paradox, from every end, it could have daring syntax and clever...
In short, we would discover, as we should already, that logic is in the eye of the logician. (For instance, here's an idea for theorists and logicians: if women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cyc...
I took off my sweatshirt and dropped it on the grass and set off around the track. As soon as I started running, the world changed. The bodies spread out across the green of the football field were parts of a scene remembered, not one real at this mo...
I'd rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but i know you'll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird..... Mockingbirds don't do one thing to but make music for us to en...
The scene is most beautiful without people in it. People just screw things up. Forget the whole thing, the world, all the living people, I tell myself, and it has a ring of truth to it. The dead are better, aren't they? The dead don't betray or harm....
We didn’t deny the obvious, but we didn’t entirely accept it either. I mean, we said hello to it each morning in the foyer. We patted its little head as it made a mess in the backyard, but we never nurtured it. Many nights the obvious showed up a...
