Is there a character in all of fiction more isolated than the little red hen?
In the feudal fiefdom of school, rank was determined early. You could change your hair and clothes. You could, having learned your lesson, not write a paper on Julius Caesar entirely in iambic pentame...
In everyone's life there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken against their will.
Whoever I was before is no one I ever got to know.
What chimps don’t seem capable of understanding is the state of false belief. They don’t have a theory of mind that accounts for actions driven by beliefs in conflict with reality. And really, who lac...
We call them feelings because we feel them. They don't start in our minds, they arise in our bodies...
There are moments in history that seem like a mist, as if what really happens matters less that what should have happened. The mists lift suddenly and there we are, my good parents and their good chil...
Over the years I've come to feel that the way people respond to us has less to do with what we've done and more to do with who they are.
Once, he’d dreamed of experimental fusions, that he would be the one to merge folk harps with anime. Now he saw the incommensurability. In his own words: matter and antimatter. The end of the world.
My education, my father liked to point out, was wider than it was deep.
It kept Mom on high alert and I worried sometimes that their marriage had become the sort Inspector Javert might have had with Jean Valjean.
I'm unclear on the definition of person the courts have been using. Something that sieves out dolphins but lets corporations slide on through.
I wonder sometimes if I'm the only one spending my life making the same mistake over and over again or if that's simply human. Do we all tend toward a single besetting sin?
I read a postelection blog post by the great Ursula K. Le Guin that said that we should stop using the metaphors of war. We should not think in terms of enemies and battles, because such thoughts, in...
I don't remember the house so well as the barn, and remember the barn less than the creek, and the creek less than an apple tree my brother and sister would climb to get into or out of their bedrooms....
Fair warning, as it turned out—kindergarten is all about learning which parts of you are welcome at school and which are not.
A man at another table accused his breakfast partner of pulling rainbows and unicorns out of her ass.
Solipsism. According to solipsism, reality exists only inside
In Chinese, the character for woman was a man on his knees
You learn as much from failure as from success, Dad always says. Though no one admires you for it.