Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.
In the phrase ' human being,' the word 'being' is much more important than the word 'human.'
I've often been accused of harnessing genre strategies to mainstream ends. I do concede that relationships, characters, and introspection are my primary interest. The fanciful is of a secondary order...
I am shaking it, popping it, laying it down and working it out
But where you succeed will never matter so much as where you fail. .
A quote hung on the opposite wall: Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
A man says something. Sometimes it turns out to be the truth, but this has nothing to do with the man who says it.
Years later, my father made a passing reference to the uncanny-valley response—the human aversion to things that look almost but not quite like people. The uncanny-valley response is a hard thing to d...
One Mother’s Day, he gave Mom a music box that played the theme from Swan Lake. She cried for days over it.
It seems to me that every time we humans announce that here is the thing that makes us unique--our featherless bipedality, our tool-using, our language--some other species comes along to snatch it awa...
Up on the Magdalen Islands, eight crew members from the Sea Shepherd sprayed more than a thousand seal pups with a harmless but permanent red dye. This dye was designed to ruin their pelts and save th...
The world runs, Lowell said, on the fuel of this endless, fathomless misery. People know it, but they don’t mind what they don’t see. Make them look and they mind, but you’re the one they hate, becaus...
Scientists have solved the problem of solipsism with a strategy called 'inference to the best explanation'. It's a cheap accommodation, and no one is happy about it, with the possible exception of tho...
If she was exposing more skin than usual, that was because it was going to be a hundred-fucking-six degrees. Was she supposed to wear a suit?
He referred to the human brain as a clown car parked between our ears. Open the doors and the clowns pile out.
He didn't believe animals could think, not in the way he defined the term, but he wasn't much impressed with human thinking, either. He referred to the human brain as a clown car parked between our ea...
Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability. I believe the same can be said of many families.
Airports and train stations are where you get to cry
A night that began with mind-reading a grateful crustacean and ended with drunken elves would be a night to remember.
The world runs on the fuel of an endless, fathomless animal misery.