You can't get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot.
Words blur at the borders, fuzz into other words, not just in big clouds of connotation around the edges of the word, but right there in the heart of denotation itself.
Wisdom is always wont to arrive late, and to be a little approximate on first possession. supposed Francis Spufford
When you discover that you are living in a fantasy that cannot endure, a fantasy that will destroy your world, and your children, what do you do?
When memory fails to contain us we must love the past more than ever, to hold it to us—or else the present becomes a meaningless blaze of color and sound, in which no two humans, great elongate beings...
What can I say, friends? he cried. This is the thing itself, there are no words for this. This is what words ask for.
We think now that love is a kind of giving of attention.
Thus it went as she made her way around the biomes of Ring B. Always she found that her mother the great engineer had made some crucial intervention, finding solutions to problems that had stymied the...
This perpetual rise and fall now got measured to an obsessive-compulsive degree, understandable given the traumas of the last century and the distinct possibility of future traumas. Sea level had for...
This is why tigers have ranges of hundreds of square kilometers, Vlad said. Robber barons are not really very efficient.
Therefore, simple syllogism: human language is futile and stupid. Meaning furthermore that human narratives are futile and stupid.
The world is like a tree, from every leaf you can work back to the roots.
The way got harder. One day they made only a kilometer.
The sand squeaked underfoot as she toed it. She looked more closely: dark grains of basalt, mixed with minute seashell fragments, and a variety of colorful pebbles, some of them no doubt brecciated fr...
The real locals were like fish in water, unaware and unimpressed.
The battle for control of science went on. Many administrations and Congresses hadn’t wanted technology or the environment assessed at all, as far as Anna could see. It might get in the way of busines...
The Aztecs had believed the world would end in one of four ways: earthquake, fire, flood, or jaguars falling from the sky. Here there would be no fire. Nor earthquake nor flood, now that he thought of...
The Amex man had even lifted his wrist to his mouth to take down a note, in a gesture obviously meant to be seen:
That's a large part of what economics is - people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers...
That a starship could be built, that it could be propelled by laser beams, that humanity could reach the stars; this idea appeared to have been an intoxicant, to people around Saturn and on Earth in p...