My cousin Roger once told me, on the eve of his third wedding, that he felt marriage was addictive. Then he corrected himself. I mean early marriage, he said. The very start of a marriage. It's like a whole new beginning. You're entirely brand-new pe...
I mean to say, really, I am near to developing a neurosis - is there anyone around who doesn't want to study or kill me?" Floote raised a tentative hand. "Ah, yes, thank you, Floote." "There is also Mrs Tunstell, madam," he offered hopefully, is if I...
As every writer knows... there is something mysterious about the writer's ability, on any given day, to write. When the juices are flowing, or the writer is 'hot', an invisible wall seems to fall away, and the writer moves easily and surely from one ...
...I think we should find some kind of shelter; a cave or something." "I don't want to do that! What if there's like, a creature living in the cave?" Tiara said. "Seriously, I saw this show once where these people were stranded on an island and there...
They're ghosts, surely, and Rabbit absolutely believes in them. There are things in the world, strange machinations of physics and chemistry,queer intersections of biology and theology, that Rabbit hasn't the slightest interest in assuming he'll ever...
Cáel sighed. “Look, right now? Either you want Rose, or you don’t. If you do—and, quite frankly, it’s obvious to me that you do—then give the woman a break and give yourself some credit for not being a whack job. Women are strange creature...
...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 on your own desires, putting aside what you wanted and appreciating wha...
You bit me on the neck? What kind of a sorry-ass vampire wannabe are you, anyhow?” I grabbed for my dirt-covered purse that lay by my feet. I kept a can of pepper spray in it for protection, or at least I used to. Did I still have it? Did those thi...
They say it came from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked ...
All of us, all human beings, are basically inclined or disposes toward what we perceive to be good. Whatever we do, we do because we think it will be of some benefit. At the same time, we all appreciate the kindness of others. We are all, by nature, ...
I was lucky to live in New York when it was dangerous and edgy and cheap enough to play host to young, penniless artists. That was the era of "coffee shops" as they were defined in New York—cheap restaurants open round the clock where you could eat...
The kindnesses … I never forget them. And so they keep one from becoming bitter. They encourage you to be as strong, as volatile as necessary to make a well world. Those people who gave me so much, and still give me so much, have a passion about th...
The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: element...
I’ve always been fascinated by science—anatomy, quantum physics, space and time theory. I don’t understand these things, but the mystery is a part of what attracts me to them. That the world I live in now is complex beyond my understanding only...
We fatties have a bond, dude. It's like a secret society. We got all kinds of shit you don't know about. Handshakes, special fat people dances-we got these secret fugging lairs in the center of the earth and we go down there in the middle of the nigh...
Alexa and the other guests, and perhaps even Georgina, all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would...
Whoever will take the trouble of reading the book ascribed to Isaiah, will find it one of the most wild and disorderly compositions ever put together; it has neither beginning, middle, nor end; and, except a short historical part, and a few sketches ...
When you have to face up to the fact that marriage to the man you love is really over, that's very tough, sheer agony. In that kind of harrowing situation, I always go away and cut myself off from the world. Also, I sober up immediately when there is...
Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises. And consequently it is possible to predict w...
For me, the times I always regret are missed opportunities to say farewell to good people, to wish them long life and say to them in all sincerity, "You build and do not destroy; you sow goodwill and reap it; smiles bloom in the wake of your passing,...
Sometimes Alton Darwin would talk to me about the planet he was on before he was transported in a steel box to Athena. 'Drugs were food,' he said. 'I was in the food business. Just because people on one planet eat a certain kind of food they're hungr...
