We are created for precisely this sort of suffering. In the end, it is all we are, these limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain.
To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and...
To be a is to become God.I tried to explain this to my friends on Heaven's Gate. 'Piss, shit,' I said. 'Asshole motherfucker, goddamn shit goddamn. Cunt. Pee-pee cunt. Goddamn!'They shook their heads...
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, wh...
The firstdown team for this planet must have had a fixation on animals. Horse, Bear, Eagle. For three days we were creeping down the east coast of Equus over an irregular coastline called the Mane. We...
The first Dying Earth sold three billion copies, I said. Pilgrim’s Progress, she said. Mein Kampf. Once in a century. Maybe less. But it sold three billion … Look, said Tyrena. In twentieth-century Ol...
The fabric of space/time is much like one of the elaborate Vatican tapestries, thinks Nemes, and she who begins pulling on loose threads does so at the peril of watching the whole tapestry ravel.
The charge took less than forty seconds but Kassad discovered that this was ample time for his mouth to go absolutely dry, his breathing to begin to have problems, and for his testicles to retreat com...
The best lack all conviction, he thought, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Dur
Stand as I did after throwing the switch, a murderer, a betrayer, but still proud, feet firmly planted on Hyperion’s shifting sand, head held high, fist raised against the sky, crying A plague on both...
Sometimes there is a thin line separating orthodox zeal from apostasy,' said Father Lenar Hoyt
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
Martin Silenus strides back to the dying fire. Worse, he says. He could be twisting on the Shrike’s steel tree. Where we’ll be in a few— Brawne Lamia rises suddenly and grasps the poet by his shirtfro...
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...
I’m a childish fellow, responded Silenus with his satyr’s smile. Ambassador—he nodded toward the Consul—could I borrow that gilded pillow you’re wearing for a hat? The
It was a wet and chilly late October morning in A.D. 1415. Kassad had been inserted as an archer into the army of Henry V of England.
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,