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 discovered what a mental stimulant physical labor could be; not mere physical labor, I should add, but absolutely spine-bending, lung-racking, gut-ripping, ligament-tearing, and ball-breaking physic...
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
I could not do this, I realized, if I were immortal. This degree of love of life and of one another is granted, I saw for once and for ever, not to immortals, but to those who live briefly and always...
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...
Her head was on my shoulder and her breathing was so deep and regular that I thought her to be asleep. I was almost asleep myself when her warm hand slid up my leg and lightly cupped me. I was startle...
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?
He suspected that Duane had lived in those lofty realms of thought, listening to the voices of men long dead rising from books the way he'd once said he listened to late-night radio shows in his basem...
He enjoyed the soft sound of night wind and the knowledge that he was the only boy — perhaps the only human being — out there in the dark on the windy, frozen-grass meadows on this night that smelled...
Francis Bacon once said, There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind.
Forcing school children to recite a national pledge doesn’t sound very American to me, said James. No, agreed Holmes. It sounds German. Very German.
For those who do not write and who never have been stirred by the creative urge, talk of muses seems a figure of speech, a quaint conceit, but for those of us who live by the Word, our muses are as re...
Every fatline receiver in the Web, Outback, galaxy, and universe would monitor the squirt, but only the Consul’s ship could decode it. Or so she hoped. The
Even in the still shadowed places, glowbirds nestled like Japanese lanterns above lighted walkways, glowing swingvines, and illuminated hanging bridges, while fireflies from Old Earth and radiant goss...
Even if it all fails, it was worth the time, Saul Laski said softly. The powerful have received their share of the world’s attention even when their power has been shown as sheer evil. The victims rem...
Don’t you see, Anthony? For all the evangelicals’ talk about this nation being founded on religious principles…this being a Christian nation and all…most of the Founding Fathers were like Jefferson…at...
Can God play a significant game with his own creature? Can any creator, even a limited one, play a significant game with his own creature?
Black man invented plasma. Fellow named Charles Drew. I read somewhere that he bled to death after a car accident in the nineteen fifties because some cracker North Carolina hospital didn’t have any ‘...
Besides, history viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.
Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one's immortality... and the inevitable disillusionment is just as...