The beauty of that June day was almost staggering. After the wet spring, everything that could turn green had outdone itself in greenness and everything that could even dream of blooming or blossoming...
I loved almost everything about being a teacher, but I was an unusual teacher.
Look,’ said Tyrena. ‘In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion unit...
Guile was no match for the world and that hubris would always be punished by the gods.
At that moment I would have welcomed spider-rats nibbling on my toes about as much as the idea of chatting with a missionary priest.
A society devoted to self-destruction and waste but unwilling to acknowledge its indulgent ways.
All good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live.
[The Void Which Binds] actual but unaccessible presence in our universe is one of the prime causes for our species elaborating myth and religion, for our stubborn, blind belief in extrasensory powers,...
Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.
I know what cancer was. How is it like humankind?Sek Hardeen's perfectly modulated, softly accented tones showed a hint of agitation. We have spread out through the galaxy like cancer cells through a...
Colonel Fedmahn Kassad knew only that all the great passions of a passionate life had led him to this place and to this moment, and if death awaited him here, then so be it. And if love and glory and...
Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written.
Men who read a lot have a more sensitive disposition, added Fowler. [...]I did not know what to say to this.Maybe reading is a sort of curse is all I mean, concluded Fowler. Maybe it's better for a ma...
I wish I could help him. I wish I could help the dozens of other Sufferers - all the victims of wounds, maulings, burns, diseases, incipient malnutrition, and melancholic despair - aboard this entrapp...
Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the...
To see and feel one's beloved naked for the first time is one of life's pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever h...
If I should die, said I to myself, I have left no immortal work behind me - nothing to make my friends proud of my memory - but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had tim...
There would be no more offerings. Not this day. Not any day. Humankind had suffered enough for its love of gods, its long search for God. He thought of the many centuries in which his people, the Jews...
People always pay a lot of money for things that make them stupid.
I wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis. To beard him in his den. To fight back for all of the injustices heaped on humanity. To allow him to alter his smug arrogance or be blown t...