Why obliterate the exceptional merely in order to make the outstanding look finer than it was?
We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.
To understand just one life you have to swallow the world.
To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?
This is how people behave when their dailiness is destroyed, when for a few moments they see, plain and unadorned, one of the great shaping forces of life. Calamity fixes them with her mesmeric eye, a...
There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name. It stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish, which were so miserab...
There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives...
The world is full of love stories, and all lovers are in a sense the avatars of their predecessors.
The inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race.
PLEASE BELIEVE that I am falling apart. I am not speaking metaphorically; nor is this the opening gambit of some melodramatic, riddling, grubby appeal for pity. I mean quite simply that I have begun t...
Otto Cone as a man of seventy-plus years jumped into an open lift shaft and died. Now this was a subject which Alicia Cone, who would readily discuss the most taboo matters refused to touch upon. Why...
One either loves, or waits for love, or banishes love for good. That is the full range of possible choices.
O my vanity I am an arrogant man, is this weakness, is it just a dream of power? Must I betray myself for a seat on the council? Is this sensible and wise or is it hollow and self-loving? I don’t even...
Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old--it is the new combinations that make them new.
Nobody can judge an internal injury, he had said, by the size of the superficial wound, of the hole.
My parents gave me the gift of irreligion, of growing up without bothering to ask people what gods they held dear, assuming that in fact, like my parents, they weren't interested in gods, and that thi...
Methwold's hair, parted in the middle has a lot to do with my beginnings. It was one of those hairlines along which history and sexuality moved.
Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which a human life moves, and joy just a series of blips, of islands in the stream.
La necesidad de una mujer que cure la soledad del asesinato —dijo el emperador, rememorando—. Que borre la culpabilidad de la victoria o la vanagloria de la derrota, aquiete el temblor de los huesos,...
Knowledge was never simply born in the human mind; it was always reborn. The relaying of wisdom from one age to the next, this cycle of rebirths: this was wisdom.