Primitive times had required primitive obedience, that later generations evolved to the point where parents offered themselves as sacrifice - as in the dark knights of the ovens which pocked old earth...
Love, that most banal of things, that most clichéd of religious motivations, had more power—Sol now knew—than did strong nuclear force or weak nuclear force or electromagnetism or gravity. Love was th...
Le disgustaba morir, y no quería morir más de lo necesario.
After ten standard months I was done, acknowledging the ancient aphorism to the effect that no book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.
Sol wanted to know how any ethical system – much less a religion so indomitable that it had survived every evil mankind could throw at it – could flow from a command from God for a man to slaughter hi...
To see and feel one's beloved naked for the first time is one of life's pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever h...
Writing, I'm convinced, should be a subversive activity - frowned on by the authorities - and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher.
Thighs flesh rather than steel, her groin matted from the moisture of their passion. Her face is dark, the sun behind her, but he sees red flames dying in the multifaceted pits of her eyes. She smiles...
Tyrena did not laugh again but her smile slashed upward in a twist of green lips. Martin, Martin, Martin, she said, the population of literate people has been declining steadily since Gutenberg’s day....
It no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters.
In the last few months, perhaps because he has had no one to speak to -- or at least no interlocutor who can respond with actual out-loud speech -- he has learned how to let different parts of his min...
From what Paul tells me, said the Monsignor, the Consul was true to his convictions, faithful to the memory of his grandmother Siri.
All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil.
It was as if they had climbed the last hill in creation.
Who are you, Hockenberry, to thwart Fate and defy the Will of the Gods?I am me, Thomas Hockenberry. I am fed up with these power-addled thugs who call themselves gods.
Planck time and Planck length, I said. I don’t remember exactly—something about combining the three fundamental constants of physics—gravity, Planck’s constant, and the speed of light. I remember it g...
Look, said Lamia, what good would telling each other stories do? When we meet the Shrike, we tell it what we want, one of us is granted the wish, and the others die. Correct?
As Ummon and the other Masters teach, it explains why the giraffe evolved a long neck but never why the other animals did not. It explains why humankind evolved to intelligence, but not why the tree n...
In such seconds of decision entire futures are made
There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing pain.