But the remarkable thing about the beetles was their sensitivity to all the grammar and directives and slogans and even unstated desires of the ant world, which they learned to manipulate. They first...
Are you a censor? Do you tell people not to say girl? Shame on you! If nothing offends you, you’re a saint or you’re psychotic. If a few things offend you, deal with them--fairly. If you’re often offe...
Then everything in Germany became black, white and red—the colors of the Third Reich.12 She thought of something that Professor Moholy-Nagy used to say: I don’t care to participate in this sort of opt...
The shortest man, codenamed RIMSKY, said to me that freedom means understanding our place within the laws of history; we are more free when we acknowledge our submission to the law of gravity than whe...
The reformed addict who feels the craving almost believes in it, then merely smiles; that
Socioeconomic formations versus an officer’s heels on a parquet floor, which would I choose?
More aid, better directed! Couldn't we all use that? And what if the universe enacts less aid, more poorly directed?
Frank thought. Each time he became someone else’s spy it got easier. The ideological virgin usually finds his first time an excruciating experience, just as an amateur hiker, used to the straight-and-...
Evil is one thing. Evil's only subjective. Illegal is another.
What do you get when you cross a nymphomaniac with a kleptomaniac? A rapist, said Tyler.
The things you love too much perish—After Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 78. The composer goes on: You have to treat everything with irony, especially the things you hold dear.
Once again I choose to quote the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (If somebody were to ask why I believe that organization instead of one that made opposing claims, I suppose I would say: Ab...
Her breasts were big and sad like owls' eyes.
Do you want to know what happiness is? Happiness is the absence of unpleasant information. I
Bones, murdered or merely perished, ought to stay silent. That's the law. But, quick and shrill as a violin-screech, they come back, to the terror of all who stand guilty of living, and then they danc...
23 He dreamed that a bomb was singing to him. From far away, the bomb was coming to marry him. The bomb was his destiny, falling on him, screaming.
The skin of her naked throat was as perfect as a political idea. She
When it comes to revolutionaries, trust only the sad ones. The enthusiastic ones are the oppressors of tomorrow.
By your command, sir, I said. But Elena was still the one I loved. Knowing that I loved her, I knew who I was.
As a certain classical slaveholder once wrote, nothing is more painful than days of joy recollected in days of misery. So