People pontificate, “Suicide is selfishness.” Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame,...

A volley of hailstones began abruptly, filled the woods with a frenzied percussion & ended on the sudden.

But you have read Madame Bovary?’ (I’d never heard of her books.) ‘No.

To enslave an individual troubles your consciences, Archivist, but to enslave a clone is no more troubling than owning the latest six-wheeler ford, ethically. Because you cannot discern our differences, you assume we have none....

When you write it, don’t write it in the manner of a spooky story. Don’t try to give an explanation. Just say that I don’t know what to make of it, just write it like...

Hay tantas verdades como hombres. De vez en cuando, alcanzo a vislumbrar una Verdad más verdadera, escondida entre simulacros imperfectos de sí misma, pero en cuanto me acerco, se agita y se hunde más todavía...

If consumers found fulfillment at any meaningful level, she extemporized, corpocracy would be finished.

Pain is strong, aye – but friends’ eyes, more strong.” I told him that he knows next to nothing about me & I know nothing about him. He jabbed at his eyes & jabbed at...

I find a certain comfort,” confesses Marinus, “in humanity’s helplessness.

Men marry women hoping they’ll never change. Women marry men hoping they will.

For most digital-age writers, writing is rewriting. We grope, cut, block, paste, and twitch, panning for gold onscreen by deleting bucketloads of crap. Our analog ancestors had to polish every line mentally before hammering it...

Every nowhere is somewhere[…]

Secrets affect you more than you’d think. You lie to keep them hidden. You steer talk away from them. You worry someone’ll discover yours and tell the world. You think you are in charge of...

Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one’s core.

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud’s...

Pues yo me hago tres preguntas muy simples: ,Cómo ha obtenido ese poder? ,Cómo lo está utilizando? Y: ,cómo se le puede arrebatar al muy hijo de puta?

Scholars discern motions of history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules, only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes?...

I think about pinball, and how being a kid’s like being shot up the firing lane and there’s no veering left or right; you’re just sort of propelled. But once you clear the top, like...

Laughter is an anarchic blasphemy. Tyrants are wise to fear it.

On bad days you wonder, ‘Why not just back off from the war and lead a quiet metalife?

Go on, my dear,” urges the snake. “Take one. Hear it? ‘Pluck me,’ it’s saying. That big, shiny red one. ‘Pluck me, pluck me now and pluck me hard.’ You know you want to.””But God,”...

Birdsong foamed in the hour-before-dawn garden.

The art teacher’s scarlet book was called Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. ‘As the title suggests,’ Mr Dunwoody saw the book’d caught my attention, ‘it’s about the history of opticians. What are you...

Life’s more science-fictiony by the day.

Taro taught me that people respect spirit, but even cowards don’t respect cowards.

La segunda ley de la supervivencia afirma que no existe una segunda ley. O comes o te comen. Punto.

I’d always worried but kissing’s not so tricky. Your lips know what to do, just like sea anenomes know what to do. Kissing spins you, like Flying Tea-Cups. Oxygen the girl breathes out, you breathe...

Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people’s women who pay the most.

I have always unswervingly held, that God, in our civilizing world, manifests Himself not in the miracles of biblical age, but in progress. It is progress that leads humanity up the ladder towards the God-head....

A weapon men use against women is the refusal to take them seriously.

A writer flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synaesthesia, and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder. Your art feeds on you, your soul, and, yes, to a degree, your sanity. Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardise...

… but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about...

…if you bare your arse to a vengeful unicorn, the number of possible outcomes dwindles to one.

How gleefully life shreds our well crafted plans.

Fantasy. Lunacy.All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.

What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence, is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will...

I’d love to know how Dad saw me when I was 6. I’d love to know a hundred things. When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to...

On, the V-word! Here it comes again.

Like Solzhenitsyn, I shall return, one bright dusk.

In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

If the affluent cannot afford hope, you cannot expect the destitute to pay for desperation.

The silences after his last gasp were sung together by a blackbird. I lay there, my eyes unable to close. His were unable to open. I listed the places where I hurt, and how much....

Había leído lo bastante como para apreciar mi ingenio literario, pero no lo bastante como para identificar mis fuentes de conocimiento. Me encantan las mujeres así. Podía decirle cosas como: “La principal diferencia entre la...

Hell is hell because, there, evil passes unremarked upon.

People’re always buried facing west, so at the end of time when the Last Trumpet blows, all the dead people’ll claw their way up and walk due west to the throne of Jesus to be...

(…)si nos convencemos de que la humanidad puede trascender colmillos y garras, si nos convencemos de que las diversas razas y credos pueden compartir pacíficamente la tierra, (…)si nos convencemos de que los gobernantes deben...

The Revelation of Sonmi 451 To be is to be perceived, and so to know thyself is only possible through the eyes of the other. The nature of our immortal lives is in the consequences...

Have you noticed,” said John, “how countries call theirs ‘sovereign nuclear deterrents,’ but call the other countries’ ones ‘weapons of mass destruction’?

What?

Tokyo is a model of that serial big-bang theory of the universe. It explodes at five P.M. and people matter is hurled to the suburbs, but by 5 A.M. the people-matter gravity reasserts itself, and...