Sol Weintraub had come to a single, unshakable conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principle which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil...
She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calenda...
Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become. Later, on his last disk to his lover the week before he died, Wu said: Words are the only bullets in...
Our apartment was filled with photos of us, notes I wrote to myself about us, holos of us on Hyperion, but … you know. In the morning he would be an absolute stranger. By afternoon I began to believe...
Or the king could die. Or the horse could die. Or he could teach the horse how to talk.
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done . . . ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world . . . Tho’ much is taken,...
Old Central School still stood upright, holding its secrets and silences firmly within. Eighty-four years of chalkdust floated in the rare shafts of sunlight inside while the memories of more than eig...
Of course it’s all a game. All of the good and hard and even bad things in life are just a game.
Mother’s estate—our estate—a thousand acres centered in a million more. Lawns the size of small prairies with grass so perfect it beckoned a body to lie on it, to nap on its soft perfection. Noble sha...
More frail and illusory Than numbers written on water, Our seeking from the Buddha Felicity in the afterworld. Archbishop Breque cleared his throat and joined in the conversation. That seems cle...
Meina Gladstone sat at the head of the long table and felt the peculiar and not-unpleasant sense of separateness which comes from far too little sleep over far too long a period.
Meaning no disrespect, sir, says the other man, but there’s no way in the Good Lord’s fucking universe that anyone can bar accidents or the unexpected.
Meaning no disrespect, sir, but there's no way in the Good Lord's fucking universe that anyone can bar accidents or the unexpected.
Mark Twain once opined in his homey way: The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
L'ondata divenne una massa urlante di rivoltosi; in quel momento, la somma dei quozienti d'intelligenza era molto inferiore a quella del più modesto componente singolo. La folla ha passioni, non cerve...
Just as well, he said. We have one deus ex machina too many as it is.
It has to be your decision. The weapon is yours to use or disregard. It pains the Core to take any human life … or, through inaction, allow any human life to come to harm. But in this case, where the...
Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering. Oh, Fanny, if only you knew! We are created for precisely this sort of s...
In an interstellar society where the Church ruled all but absolutely, news awaited not only independent confirmation but official permission to exist.
I was thinking about how free of mobs recent centuries had been: to create a mob there must be public meetings, and public meetings in our time consisted of individuals communing via the All Thing or...