It was so kind of you to write to me about your experiences during the Occupation. At the war's end, I, too, promised myself that I had done with talking about it. I had talked and lived war for six years, and I was longing to pay attention to someth...
That’s when I realized it. I liked this girl. A lot. I liked her super-moist double chocolate chip cupcakes. I liked how kind and patient she was with the guests, the way her forehead crinkled when she was thinking about a problem. I liked her low,...
I always thought that falling in love should feel like jumping from a cliff. A fall that scares you as much as it excites you, that leaves you breathless and wanting more. The impossible kind … that ruins you for everyone else. This wasn’t it, an...
The sandy beach reminded Harold of picnics. And the thought of picnics made him hungry. So he laid out a nice simple picnic lunch. There was nothing but pie. But there were all nine kinds of pie that Harold liked best. When Harold finished his picnic...
...You believe that the kind of story you want to tell might be best received by the science fiction and fantasy audience. I hope you're right, because in many ways this is the best audience in the world to write for. They're open-minded and intellig...
I used to think--and given the way we ended up, maybe I still do--that all relationships need the kind of violent shove that a crush brings, just to get you started and to push you over the humps. And then, when the energy from that shove has gone an...
I think of what wild animals are in our imaginations. And how they are disappearing — not just from the wild, but from people’s everyday lives, replaced by images of themselves in print and on screen. The rarer they get, the fewer meanings animal...
I later heard somewhere, or read, that Malcolm X telephoned an apology to the reporter. But this was the kind of evidence which caused many close observers of the Malcolm X phenomenon to declare in absolute seriousness that he was the only Negro in A...
She tapped her chest. “No, I’m not a freak, okay, so could you stop pressuring me.” Rafael muttered something under his breath, throwing up his hands in surrender. “So what am I? What’s Karhl, Jayani, my brother, and all the BaSatai? Are we...
She understood now why so many members of her kind died so young. It was possible to squeeze an entire lifetime of living into a single day: to live more, to more, in the span of twenty-four hours than most did in eighty years. Shape-shifters lived i...
See what's inside a drop of water. The whole seed of the universe. Come, come. See what's inside a drop of blood. The composition of life. It's all there. Hate as well. We approach the mystery of life, but it's impossible to understand the mystery of...
It's been happening since I was in kindergarten. Not them all the time, but other kids, you know. Every day. It never stops, and it never goes away, thanks to the Internet--it just keeps happening every minute, every day. And I just want it to stop. ...
It's clear to me now that I have been moving toward you and you toward me for a long time. Though neither of us was aware of the other before we met, there was a kind of mindless certainty bumming blithely along beneath our ignorance that ensured we ...
I won,” said Chelsea’s dad, and went to give Chelsea a high-five, but missed, as they were standing too close. “My fault,” he said. “That was my fault.” “Oh,” Chelsea said. And he stepped back a little and tried again, but Chelsea, di...
The most fearsome monsters of all may inhabit the dark corners of our mind waiting for us to release them through our believes and gullibility. the phenomenon feeds on fear and believe. Sometimes it destroys us altogether other times it leads us upwa...
You pathetic humans! It escapes me how you endure any trial long enough even to breed, yet here you are. And why do your kind persist at all? Because every now and then—once a century, perhaps—ONE of you understands this: Death is what you accept...
Maybe, life is a kind of waking dream. Maybe, it's a double-dream with a false awakening. Maybe, the dream only becomes lucid and truly luminous given the fuller perspective of life after one's own wake. Maybe, the pictures never stop. Doesn't the ex...
I wish I could say he was a French professor, a French chef, or even a bilingual tutor, but I can’t. He worked in a factory and spent his summer evenings at a reenactment village as a blacksmith or something equally masculine. But it didn’t reall...
When you’re alive, you don’t dwell on how you’re going to spend your time once you’re dead. You just figure you’re gone, and the rest will pretty much take care of itself. Or you think you’re not really going to die. You’re going to be ...
According to Wallace, the expectation that art amuses is a 'poisonous lesson for a would-be artist to grow up with,' since it places all of the power with the audience, sometimes breeding resentment on the part of the author. 'I can see it in myself ...
Vigil couldn't quite put his finger on it, but his gut kept telling him that there was some kind of connection between the capacity to love and the capacity to love running. The engineering was certainly the same: both depended on loosening your grip...
