Jane, be still; don't struggle so like a wild, frantic bird, that is rending its own plumage in its desperation." "I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.
When I got started again, I drove slower and felt smaller. I think it does us all good to get looked at like that now and then by a wild animal.
Denna is a wild thing," I explained. "Like a hind or a summer storm. If a storm blows down your house, or breaks a tree, you don't say the storm was mean. It was cruel. It acted according to its nature and something unfortunately was hurt. The same i...
The dragon turned on the children and unicorns, his mouth open. For a brief moment, they could see his eyes change from blue to a deep red, like coals in a fire. It was almost as if another, fiercer dragon looked at them through Zebedia’s eyes.
But it would be broadcast, and in the great public theatre of his age; that unregulated market of braying narcissists, that Wild West of disinformation and fraud, that infinite sea of piracy, the great electorate where the constituency of billions vo...
Because as any writer will tell you, an IDEA for a book is like falling in love, it’s all wild emotion and headlong rush, but the ACTUAL ACT of writing a book is like building a relationship: it is joyous, slow, fragile, frustrating, exhilarating, ...
Miss Prendregast!” He rapped on his desk with his knuckles. “You were never in any danger!” “Except from the wild animals.” His lids swept down as if he needed a reprieve from looking at her. “Alert me if you’re attacked by a rabbit.
We hand the meat over to Greasy Sae in the kitchen. She likes District 13 well enough, even though she thinks the cooks are somewhat lacking in imagination. But a woman who came up with a palatable wild dog and rhubarb stew is bound to feel as if her...
She had large, questioning eyes that seemed to draw me in and a sense of quiet outrage that simmered just beneath the surface. More than anything, within her features, there was a streak of wild quirkiness that made her dazzlingly attractive.
Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age,...
To be alone with yourself is to be alone. To be in the company of others is to be alone together. The only time you are not alone is when you forget yourself and reach out in love -- the lines of self blur, and just for a wild, flickering moment you ...
Over the summit, I saw the so-called Mono desert lying dreamily silent in the thick, purple light -- a desert of heavy sun-glare beheld from a desert of ice-burnished granite.
There is evidence that the honoree [Leonard Cohen] might be privy to the secret of the universe, which, in case you're wondering, is simply this: Everything is connected. . Many, if not most, of the links are difficult to determine. The instrument, t...
She didn't want soft and gentle. She needed his rough possession, claiming her, branding her, taking her in a firestorm of heat and flame that would end the world around them, leaving them nothing but ashes, clean and fierce and forever welded togeth...
Isabel wondered if there would ever be a time when she could stop being careful. If there would ever be a time when she could use other kinds of power. She missed it. It felt like part of her had been injected with novocaine and was totally numb. Alm...
We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathoma...
It was wrong to capture wild animals and confine them in captivity for people to go and gawk at them. And that's basically how zoos got started. But once you do that, and once you have animals that have been bred in captivity, you're really stuck wit...
There is no excuse for keeping wild animals in amusement parks or circuses. Until our governments take action, we should avoid supporting places where captive wild animals perform for our amusement. If the public will not pay to see them, the busines...
Remind me," Jubal said to her, "to write a popular article on the compulsive reading of news. The theme will be that most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to tthe unecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the toubles and sins of f...
For better or worse, zoos are how most people come to know big or exotic animals. Few will ever see wild penguins sledding downhill to sea on their bellies, giant pandas holding bamboo lollipops in China or tree porcupines in the Canadian Rockies, ba...
If you read novels of the 19th century, they're pretty experimental. They take lots of chances; they seem to break a lot of rules. You've got omniscient narrators lecturing at times to the reader in first person. If you go back to the earliest novels...