Sort of like the Grim Reaper, but with a penchant for sticking souls on a giant thorn tree … while the people’s souls are still in their bodies. King
Quality wine, Scotch, and coffee had been the three irreplaceable commodities after the death of Old Earth.
Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion, and
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.
Nobody gets beyond a petroleum economy. Not while there's petroleum there.
Mountaineers know that all mountains are in a constant state of collapse—their verticality being inescapably and inevitably worn down every moment by wind, water, weather, and gravity—but
Johnny sighed in the darkness. I don’t understand the exact purpose of the Keats Project or the other Old Earth analogs, but I suspect that it is part of a TechnoCore project going back at least seven...
In the end, thought Sol, past logic and hope, it is dreams and the love of those dearest to us that form Abraham’s answer to God.
In the end, it is all we are, these limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain. We are destined and designed to bear our pain with us, hugging it tight to our bellies like...
I wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis, he said in low, tight tones. To beard him in his den. To fight back for all of the injustices heaped on humanity. To allow him to alter his...
I was full of piss and vinegar in those days, not to mention too stupid to know better, in other words still in my twenties,
I think one begins to feel when things aren’t important. I’m not sure how to put it. When you’ve spent thirty years entering rooms filled with strangers you feel less pressure than when you’ve had onl...
I doubt if he ever confronted and acknowledged his own deeper motivations, except when they were as pure as spring water.
I did not forget that there was a panic button. The problem is simple—when there is real panic, one does not immediately think of buttons. The
Humanity had become as blasé about sharing their lives with potential AI monitoring as pre-Civil War Old Earth USA-southern families had been about speaking in front of their human slaves. Nothing cou...
Human art, Mahnmut knew, simply transcended human beings.
Hobbes’s Leviathan. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
He’d used a ladder to get three … maybe four meters … up on the bole of the tree. Built a sort of platform. For his feet. Broken the arrestor rods off … little more than spikes … then sharpened them....
Henry James hated epilogues and refused to use them in his fiction. He said that life granted us no epilogues, so why should art or literature?