Socrates is flying. No, he is soaring. The wings behind him beat in a calming rhythm while the cool air rushes past. His wings are all that matter, snapping at the rushing wind like the sails of some great sea vessel, the feathery appendages all he i...
Forgiveness. The frail beauty of the world takes root in me as I make my way back through the woods, past the caves and the ravine, where the earth has accepted the flesh of the deer, leaving nothing but a bone or two, peeking above Kartik's makeshif...
I've wandered through the real world, and written myself through the darkness of the streets inside me. I see people walking through the city and wonder where they've been, and what the moments of their lives have done to them. If they're anything li...
My name," I tell Wilbur in the most dignified voice I can find, "Was inspired by Harriet Quimby, the first female American pilot and the first woman ever to cross the Channel in an aeroplane. My mother chose it to represent freedom and bravery and in...
He read the veinings of a leaf, the pattern on a mushroom cap, and divined mysteries, relations, futures, possibilities: the magic of symbols, the foreshadowing of numbers and writing, the reduction of infinitudes and multiplicities to simplicity, to...
The way sadness works is one of the strangest riddles of the world. If you are stricken with a great sadness, you may feel as if you have been set aflame, not only because of the enormous pain, but also because your sadness may spread over your life,...
But why would they do that? What is to be asked? He was a man who sees things -- very ordinary things. A hat left on the floor of a café in Kingstown, a proverb overheard, an old fisherman mending a net: these, for him, were a kind of incitement. Th...
And there has been no attempt to investigate it,' I said, 'to see what it really is?' 'Eh, Cornel,' said the coachman's wife, 'wha would investigate, as ye call it, a thing that nobody believes in? Ye would be the laughing-stock of a' the country-sid...
Ginny Cupper took me in her car out to the spread fields of Indiana. Parking near the edge of woods and walking out into the sunny rows of corn, waving seeds to a yellow horizon. She wore a white blouse and a gray patch of sweat under her arms and th...
I was now well prepared to be a career criminal. I had the proper training and a natural feel for the business. I had a respect for the old-liners like Angelo and Don Frederico. I had been a witness to both murder and betrayal and had my appetite whe...
Amazing how the most obvious things escape your notice. Maybe the truth is exactly the things you don't notice. Maybe the aim to see and tell the truth is inherently futile, a contradiction in terms, and it's exactly those things about oneself and th...
Running isn't a sport for pretty boys...It's about the sweat in your hair and the blisters on your feet. Its the frozen spit on your chin and the nausea in your gut. It's about throbbing calves and cramps at midnight that are strong enough to wake th...
Let me give you some counsel, bastard,” Lannister said. “Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armor yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.” Jon was ...
You end up with a machine which knows that by its mildest estimate it must have terrible enemies all around and within it, but it can't find them. It therefore deduces that they are well-concealed and expert, likely professional agitators and terrori...
When someone cries so hard that it hurts their throat, it is out of frustration or knowing that no matter what you can do or attempt to do can change the situation. When you feel like you need to cry, when you want to just get it out, relieve some of...
Being a hangman requires you to take someone else’s life based on someone else’s judgment, and carry it out on someone else’s schedule. The job does not provide the same satisfaction that an ordinary murderer gets from smashing a skull. It robs...
Everybody talks about freedom, citizens," the big man said gently, seeming to draw upon that very sure source of personal knowledge again, "but they dont really want it. Half of them wants it but the other half dont. What they really want is to maint...
The truth is that good fantasies carefully limit the magic that's possible. In fact, the magic has to be defined, at least in the author's mind, as a whole new set of natural laws that cannot be violated during the course of the story. That is, if at...
All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... to make life bearable." REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE. "Tooth fairi...
It is always as it was between Achilles and Homer: one person has the experience, the sensation, the other it. A real writer only gives words to the affects and experiences of others; he is an artist in divining a great deal from the little that he h...
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...
