I realize now that what I was trying to do with the Armaghast data was offer the Church not a rebirth but only a transition to a false life such as these poor walking corpses inhabit. If the Church is...
I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d.
I explored religions and serious drinking, finding more hope of lasting solace in the latter.
I discovered that the difference between finding the right word as opposed to accepting the almost right word was the difference between being struck by lightning and merely watching a lightning displ...
Hunt shook his head and quit writing. I don’t understand. You can become this … messiah … by leaving your deathbed? The pale oval of Keats’s face moved back and forth on the pillow in a motion which m...
How they must have thought their efforts and adventures over, only to have to pick up their burdens again. How often, I realized now as an adult in my standard thirties, how often that is the case in...
Here’s the deal. Willi’s bought the rights to a paperback best-seller called The White Slaver. It’s a piece of formulized shit written for illiterate fourteen-year-olds and the kind of lobotomized hou...
Have you always used a pen? No, I said, only when I want to write something worth reading.
Francis Crozier believes in nothing. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities. Nothin...
Edouard, I have spent so many hours wrestling with my faith—my lack of faith—but now, in this fearful corner of an all but forgotten world, riddled as I am with this loathsome parasite, I have somehow...
But it sold three billion … 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...
Are we so sure that Christ always knew what to do next? He knew what had to be done. It is not always the same as knowing what to do.
Among us we represent islands of time as well as separate oceans of perspective. Or perhaps more aptly put, each of us may hold a piece to a puzzle no one else has been able to solve since humankind f...
America was a nation that refused to grow up. It was a perpetual baby, a vast, pink, fleshy toddler, now in possession of some terrible weapons it did not know how to hold properly, much less use prop...
Ah, grinned Old Sludge, showing his one tooth, going to the company store to get some algae chewies, huh? Goddamn poopoo, I would grin back at him.
After seven centuries of existence and at least four centuries where few citizens existed without it, the datasphere – including the All Thing and all comm and access bands – simply ceased to be. Hund...
Achilles pauses, looks over his shoulder at the masses of men behind him, turns back, looks past Zeus toward Olympos and the masses of gods in front of him, and then crooks his neck to look up again a...
Abraham was testing God. By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right—in Abraham’s eyes and the hearts of his offspring—to become the God of Abraham.
A philosopher/mathematician named Bertrand Russell who lived and died in the same century as Gass once wrote: Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not...
—Can we stop them? Kassad was panting, pouring sweat, and literally quivering from excitement. —