Cain said he wasn't Abel's keeper. Are those our only choices, keeper or killer?
Shylocking
Regummed. A regummed stamp is one which has lost its original gum somewhere along the way, only to have it replaced with new gum. When the equivalent is performed on, say, a Rembrandt oil painting, we...
When writing functions in this fashion as self-directed psychotherapy, we err if we demand that people be entertained and enlightened by the process.
When someone put money in your hand you closed your fingers around it and put it in your pocket.
There are eight million stories in the naked city, he intoned. You remember that program? Used to be on television some years back.I remember.They had that line at the end of every show. ‘There are ei...
Right there! See the blue on its head? See the long tail? Oh, there he is, I said, just to bring this little farce to an end. I couldn’t see the bird, and I knew I wasn’t going to see the bird, and I...
People don't get to change things. Things change people once in a while, but people don't change things.
I thought I'd go home and reread Sue Grafton. It's been a while since I last read the one about the topless dancer who gets poison injected into one of her implants.'D' Is For Cup.Right. Bern, you kno...
I found the various plebiscite regions of considerable interest before I owned any of their stamps. In the course of remaking the map of Europe after the World War—we wouldn’t come to call it World Wa...
He was always inclined to be a moody man, very exuberant when things were going right, very depressed when they weren't.
Faith and fear, they tell me, can't coexist. I try to practice by doing what I'm afraid to do, and I manage (now and then, anyway) by means of faith. Faith that I will do myself more good than harm by...
Everybody tells me what a timesaver the Internet is, and how they can't believe they ever got along without it. And I know what they mean, but every time I use it I wind up wondering what people did w...
Being broke is not a crime, nor is it proof of one’s inadequacy as a writer or as a human being. If you go around with an attitude of implicit apology for being temporarily without funds, it’s going t...
And, as long as you can make yourself go on choosing the pain over the relief, you can keep going.
A treat indeed, to read Raymond Chandler for the first time. I almost envied the man,
36.80. So all I have to do is wait and acquire each stamp as it becomes available, right? Well, yes, at least in theory. But what happens, more often than not, is that a stamp I need is grouped in a s...
That would have hidden the decades of filth that had left their stamp upon the wooden floor.
Philately is far and away the area of my life where I spend the most time and effort making genuinely inconsequential decisions.
Novels pass in and out of my hands while volumes of poetry are mine for life.