Right,' he said uncertainty. His mind was grinding through the problem. She was a witch. Just lately there'd been a lot of gossip about witches being bad for your health. He'd been told not to let wit...
Reality is not digital, an on-off state, but analog. Something . In other words, reality is a quality that things possess in the same way that they possess, say, weight. Some people are more real than...
Perhaps the magic would last, perhaps it wouldn't. But then again, what does?
People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around.
Our rulers rule by consent, which means that we like having them as rulers, if they do what we want them to do.
No other library anywhere, for example, has a whole gallery of unwritten books - books that would have been written if the author hadn't been eaten by an alligator around chapter 1, and so on. Atlases...
No one knew where you were before you were born, but when you were born, it wasn't long before you found you'd arrived with your return ticket already punched.
No one actually saw it land, which raised the interesting philosophical point: When millions of tons of angry elephant come spinning through the sky, but there is no one to hear it, does it - philosop...
Needless to say, they refused to submit to the Empire, conducting such a persistent guerrilla war that the Romans gave up hope of conquering Scotland, and the Wee Free Men remained both wee and free.
Maybe the only significant difference between a really smart simulation and a human being was the noise they made when you punched them.
Let him be whoever he thinks he is, she said. That’s all anybody could hope for in this world.
Koan ninety-seven: Do unto otters as you would have them do unto you. Hmm. No real help there. Besides, he'd occasionally been unsure that he'd written that one down properly, although it certain had...
I’m made up of the memories of my parents and grandparents, all my ancestors. They’re in the way I look, in the color of my hair. And I’m made up of everyone I’ve ever met who’s changed the way I thin...
It would take a lot to faze a copper from the Met.It would take, for example, a huge, battered car that was nothing more nor less than a fireball, a blazing, roaring, twisted metal lemon from Hell, dr...
It will certainly show what our ancestors would be thinking if they were alive today. People have often speculated about this. Would they approve of modern society, they ask, would they marvel at pres...
It was, according to the history books, the fastest coronation since Bubric the Saxon crowned himself with a very pointy crown on a hill during a thunderstorm, and reigned for one and a half seconds.
It was written in some holy book, apparently, so that made it okay, and probably compulsory.
It was no use getting angry with Wullie; he lived in a Wullie-shaped world of his own. You had to think diagonally.
It was never easy being a witch. Oh, the broomstick was great, but to be a witch you needed to be sensible, so sensible that sometimes it hurt. You dealt with the reality—not what people wanted.
It was much better to imagine men in some smokey room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn't then y...