I understand now that boundaries between noise and sound are conventions. All boundaries are conventions waiting to be transcended. One may transcend any convention if only one can first conceive of doing so. In moments...

Trees’re always a relief, after people.

Do,” said Louisa finally, “whatever you can’t not do.

Sometimes language can’t even read the music of meaning.

But this isn’t a ghost story: the ghost is in the background, where she has to be. If she was in the foreground she’d be a person.

Lady Moon rose an’ gazed o’er my busted’n’beautsome Valleys with silv’ry’n’sorryin’ eyes, an’ the dingos mourned for the died uns.

Will I be some kid’s dad one day? Are any future people lurking deep inside mine?…Which girl’s carrying the other half of my kid, deep in those intricate loops? What’s she doing right now? What’s...

Prayer may be a placebo for the disease of helplessness, but placebos can make you feel better.

science devises ever bloodier means of war until humanity’s powers of destruction overcome our powers of creation and our civilisation drives itself to extinction.

The library refused many downloads, of course, but I succeeded with two Optimists translated from the Late English, Orwell and Huxley;

Es un ciclo tan antiguo como el tribalismo. Todo comienza con la ignorancia. La ignorancia genera miedo. El miedo genera odio y el odio genera violencia. La violencia provoca más violencia hasta que la única...

Right, my phone. When these things first appeared, they were so cool. Only when it was too late did people realize they are as cool as electronic tags on remand prisoners.

The double-crossed, might-have-been history of my country is not the study of what actually took place here: it’s the study of historians’ studies. . . .Memories are their own descendants masquerading as the ancestors of...

Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Dreams are beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk awhile with the still are.

Reading off a page is like looking down at a landscape from a balloon – your eye “sees” the story as well as reads it, its layout, its paragraphs and structure, and “remembers” what it...

Power and moneyLike Pooh Bear and honeyStick fast.

So little is actually worthy of belief or disbelief. Better to strive to coexist than seek to disapprove . . .

Photos’re better than nothing, but things’re better than photos ’cause the things themselves were part of what was there.

This isn’t lust. Lust wants, does the obvious, and pads back into the forest. Love is greedier. Love wants round-the-clock care; protection; rings, vows, joint accounts; scented candles on birthdays; life insurance. Babies. Love’s a...

Politicians and sports coaches both need to be smart enough to master the game, but dumb enough to think it matters.

Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides… I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they...

At dawn the waves looked like mountain ranges tipped with gold as sunbeams slanted low under burgundy clouds.

intellectual courage” is to dispense with these fig leaves & admit all peoples are predatory, but White predators, with our deadly duet of disease dust & firearms, are examplars of predacity par excellence, & what...

This is my moral. Trust what you dream. Not what you think.

Lunatics are writers whose works write them, Bat.” “Not all lunatics are writers, Mrs. Rey-believe me.” “But most writers are lunatics, Bat-believe me. The human world is made up of stories, not people.

We—by whom I mean anyone over sixty—commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts,...

At certain rare moments, a library is a kind of mind.

Bunlardan nasıl bir ahlak dersi çıkarmalı? Barış, Rabbimiz tarafından ne kadar sevilse de, ancak komşularınız da sizin gibi vicdanlıysa esas erdemlerden biri sayılır.

natural” (oh, weaselly word!) order of things?Why? Because of this:—one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual,...

It’s a very special talent that men have, to possess seeing eyes yet be so blind.

Probably in a parallel universe not far from here, I’m working for Nintendo.

Such narrative arcs make good movies but shitty existences.

…it’s not just the person who fills a house, it’s their I’ll be back later!s, their toothbrushes and unused hats and coats, their belongingnesses.

Integrity is a bugger, it really is. Lying can get you into difficulties, but to really wind up in the crappers try telling nothing but the truth.

As for reading, I wish I had a magic door to a library where I could go in, read for days and days, and come back in the same minute I left. I’m still looking...

El poder, el tiempo, la gravedad, el amor. Las fuerzas que de verdad mueven el cotarro son invisibles.

To implant belief . . . is to dominate the believers.

The clock’s pendulum catches the firelight, and in the rattle-breathed final moments of Jacob de Zoet, amber shadows in the far corner coagulate into a woman’s form. She slips between the bigger, taller onlookers unnoticed...

He thinks of the all steps that gathered this party and marvels at the weaverless looms of fortune.

…I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave & because I must begin somewhere. I hear my father-in-law’s response: ‘Oho, fine, Whiggish sentiments, Adam. But don’t...

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.