Shortness of life was a primary force in the permanence of institutions, strange though it is to say it. But it is so much easier to hold onto whatever short-term survival scheme you have, rather than...
It was a world of acts, and words had no more influence on acts than the sound of a waterfall has on the flow of the stream.
Happy and angry. Happily angry. Everything, all at once. That's life, boy. You just keep getting fuller, until you burst and Allah takes you and casts your soul into another life later on. And so ever...
Fungibility, n. The tendency of everything to be completely interchangeable with money. Health, for instance.
And in this curious state I had the realization, at the moment of seeing that stranger there, that I was a person like everybody else. That I was known by my actions and words, that my internal univer...
A thug. In peacetime Fitch would be hanging around a pool table giving the cops trouble. He was perfect for war. Tibbets had chosen his men well - most of them, anyway. Moving back past Haddock Januar...
A square object was visible at a greater distance than a round object of the same area.
Omnipresent sublime,
You’ve located intrinsic worth in the wrong place, she said to all of them, over the common band. It’s like a rainbow. Without an observer at a twenty-three-degree angle to the light reflecting off a...
We demand justice, Jeff says. we don't have it, the world is a mess because of assholes who think they can steal everything and get away with it. So we have to overwhelm them and get back to justice.A...
Very few people ever bother to find out what other people really think. They are willing to accept whatever they are told about anyone sufficiently distant.
This was perhaps the evolutionary usefulness of the elderly, Bao had concluded: to give the young some kind of psychic shield from reality, putting them under a description which allowed them to ignor...
There is no such thing as purity. It’s an idea in the heads of religious fanatics, the kind of people who kill because they are so good and righteous.
The way got harder. One day they made only a kilometer.
Saint George, a social terrarium in which the men think they are living in a Mormon polygamy, while the women consider it a lesbian world with a small percentage of male lesbians
Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since
Really? Yes. Lord of the Flies is like some Christian support group compared to the mean girls’ club.
One sequence of these diary notes had lasted longer than most, and by their content he saw that they came from the time right after his father had died. One line stuck him like a thorn:Alone in the ho...
Mozart’s pet starling once revised a phrase he wrote. The bird sang it after he played it on the piano, but changed all the sharps to flats. Mozart described it happening in the margin of the score. ‘...
It was that sort of sleep in which you wake every hour and think to yourself that you have not been sleeping at all; you can remember dreams that are like reflections, daytime thinking slightly warped...