He was not sure, but liked it. It recurred when they met suddenly or had been silent. It beckoned to him across intellect, saying, "This is all very well, you're clever, we know—but come!" It haunted him so that he watched for it while his brain an...
She had not told her mother about Denys, but she had a suspicion that Mrs. Shannon knew all about it nevertheless. It was unlike her not to want to satisfy her curiosity when she came upon her daughter sobbing in various parts of the house. She had a...
New Rule: If an Evangelical tries to use Halloween to pimp Jesus to kids, they get to egg his house. On Halloween, the president of the American Family Association urged his flock to hand out a Christian-based comic book instead of candy. Excuse me, ...
If I learned anything about her it was that she lived with a vehemence most of us never have the courage for." Banks tells me. "But there was something about her that precluded an ordinary existence. In some ways, I'm not surprised she's dead. A job,...
While my chosen form of story-writing is obviously a special and perhaps a narrow one, it is none the less a persistent and permanent type of expression, as old as literature itself. There will always be a certain small percentage of persons who feel...
I am your sire. I am to guide you through your first days as a vampire. Your first feeding is a rite of passage, a sacrament. It will not be wasted on some hormone-driven frenzy. This is why I wanted you to feed from me.” “I will not drink it in ...
The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning: The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the fu...
You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwillingly giving you for a portrait - a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished. And, though this is an absorbing pursuit, nevertheless, the painters are ...
That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We cou...
I wonder if he practices making awkward and nerdy look sort of cool. Like he fills his house with furniture that is the wrong scale for his tall body and buys plaid shirts in bulk and tells his barber to leave crazy, too-long pieces of hair mixed in ...
In this land I have made myself sick with silence In this land I have wandered, lost In this land I hunkered down to see What will become of me. In this land I held myself tight So as not to scream. -But I did scream, so loud That this land howled ba...
Then there was a fine noise of rushing water from the crown of an oak at his back, as if a spigot there had been turned. Then the noise of fountains came from the crowns of all the tall trees. Why did he love storms, what was the meaning of his excit...
What Karen wants to do - needs to do - is cry, but she can't. Here, alone, when she could howl, beat the sofa cushions, scream; now, somehow, she is unable. It's for fear that if she gives in to it, she'll lose all sense of who she is. She is afraid ...
Maybe that's what growing up means, in the end - you go far enough in the direction of - somewhere - and you realise that you've neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything. [...] We don't get an endless number of orbits away from the pla...
Knowledge isn't truth. It's just mindless agreement. You agree with me, I agree with someone else - we all have knowledge. We haven't come any closer to the truth. You can never understand anything by agreeing, by making definitions. Only by turning ...
I have never loved Fortune, even when she seemed most to love me. I never considered her treasures mine, neither her money, nor her office nor her influence. Her theft of these things, therefore. has taken away nothing of my own. Mother, my roof is t...
...and yet, though desirous to be gone, she could not quit the mansion-house, or look an adieu to the cottage, with its black, dripping and comfortless veranda, or even notice through the misty glasses the last humble tenements of the village, withou...
Our heroes have arrived, then," the stranger said, his voice a soft, bubbly murmur. "Excuse me?" Poison queries. The odd creature put down his rod in a little wooden cradle that rested next to him and got up from the edge of the jetty. He looked them...
When dreaded outcomes are actually imminent we don't worry about themwe take action. Seeing lava from the local volcano make its way down the street toward our house does not cause worry it causes running. Also we don't usually choose imminent events...
Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven't the answer to a question you've been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the ex...
After Carol had left, as Symons threw away a pile of used tissues and rearranged the cushions on the couch, he remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him [as a career counselor] was the idea that they ough...
