To take that risk, to offer life and remain alive, open yourself like this and become whole.

She would roll up her sleeves and dispense with sentimentality, and do whatever blood-soaked, bad-smelling thing had to be done. She would become adept with axes.

We shouldn’t have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.

If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you’d be doomed. You’d be ruined as God....

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which...

Perhaps its not the world that is soundless but we who are deaf.

The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it’s one of the shapes money takes when it freezes. Money has trickled through this room for years and years, as if through an underground cavern, crusting and hardening...

It’s psychic. It’s the age. It’s chemical.

I love you. You’re the only one.” She isn’t the first woman he’s ever said that to. He shouldn’t have used it up so much earlier in his life, he shouldn’t have treated it like...

I’m not going to have a husband anyway,” said Laura. “I’m going to live by myself in the garage.

We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

I’ve never bought into any sort of hard and fast, this-box/that-box characterization. People are individuals. Yes, they may be expected to be a particular way. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to be that way.

Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond.

[T]he mothers who had sold their children felt empty and sad. They felt as if this act, done freely by themselves (no one had forced them, no one had threatened them) had not been performed...

Lambhood and tigerishness may be found in either gender, and in the same individual at different times.

You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.

A truth should exist,it should not be usedlike this. If I love youis that a fact or a weapon?

Via the conduit of a wild dog pack, she has now made the ultimate Gift to her fellow Creatures, and has become part of God’s great dance of proteins.

The Loneliness of the Military HistorianConfess: it’s my professionthat alarms you.This is why few people ask me to dinner,though Lord knows I don’t go out of my way to be scary.I wear dresses of sensible...

Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to him. In addition it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage,...

How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.

There were no men in this painting, but it was about men, the kind who caused women to fall. I did not ascribe any intentions to these men. They were like the weather, they didn’t...

I didn’t much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.

That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even...

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.

I got into trouble a while ago for saying that I thought the internet led to increased literacy – people scolded me about the shocking grammar to be found online – but I was talking...

If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling. I don’t...

Science is a tool, and we invent tools to do things we want. It’s a question of how those tools are used by people.

I have a big following among the biogeeks of this world. Nobody ever puts them in books.

They’ve removed anything you can tie a rope to.

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you...

The young habitually mistake lust for love, they’re infested with idealism of all kinds.

The internet is 95 percent porn and spam

Potential has a shelf life.

Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.

When you’re young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You’re your own speeding car. You think you can get...

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

Once she wasn’t supposed to like it. To have her in a position she didn’t like, that was power. Even if she liked it she had to pretend she didn’t. Then she was supposed to...

Had she believed all that? Old Pilar’s folklore? No, not really; or not exactly. Most likely Pilar hadn’t quite believed it either, but it was a reassuring story: that the dead were not entirely dead...

Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.

They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.

If social stability goes pear-shaped, you have a choice between anarchy and dictatorship. Most people will opt for more security, even if they have to give up some personal freedom.

Social media is called social media for a reason. It lends itself to sharing rather than horn-tooting.

If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There’s also the environmental argument for it.

Once you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it.

So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he’d been invited, but at an address he couldn’t actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life...

People are now familiar with this kind of interaction. They may even have a more intimate moment that way.

Sanity is a valuable possesion; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.