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...

You know 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...

I used to jog but it’s bad for the knees. Too much beta carotene turns you orange, too much calcium gives you kidney stones. Health kills.

Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.

Myths can’t be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.

‘1984’ is not a wonder tale. Not only could it happen, but it has happened, but under different names.

I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, ‘Nobody under 40,’ or ‘Nobody under 25.’ With my books, it always has been, and continues...

More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.

Think of yourselves as pearls. We, sitting in our rows, eyes down, we make her salivate morally. We are hers to define, we must suffer her adjectives. I think about pearls. Pearls are congealed oyster...

Fraternize means to behave like a brother. Luke told me that. He said there was no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be, he said. From the...

I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did...

So by the time the morning came, Odysseus and I were indeed friends, as Odysseus had promised we would be. Or let me put it another way: I myself had developed friendly feelings towards him...

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

Maybe I don’t really want to know what’s going on. Maybe I’d rather not know. Maybe I couldn’t bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.

Gavin has tried quoting Yeats to the effect that women must labour to be beautiful, but Reynolds–who used to be a passionate Yeats fan–is now of the opinion that Yeats is entitled to his point...

Walking was not fast enough so we ran. Running was not fast enough, so we galloped. Galloping was not fast enough, so we sailed. Sailing was not fast enough, so we rolled merrily along on...

Who cares, who cares. The perennial adolescent riposte. I cared, of course. I cared what people thought. I always did care. Unlike Laura, I have never had the courage of my convictions.

Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous.

you can’t change the past,Aunt Lou used to say.Oh, but I wanted to;that was the one thing I really wanted to do

If someone wants to suck your toes, those toes should be worth sucking.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

I was born in the Ottawa General Hospital right after the Gray Cup Football Game in 1939. Six months later, I was backpacked into the Quebec bush. I grew up in and out of the...

I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren’t very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about...

The darkness is really out there. It’s not something that’s in my head, just. It’s in my work because it’s in the world.

Where was the threshold, between the inner world and the outer one? We each move unthinkingly through this gateway every day, we use the passwords of grammar–I say, you say, he and she, it, on...

War is what happens when language fails

All myths are stories, but not all stories are myths: among stories, myths hold a special place.

I stand in the dark, start to unbutton. Then I hear something inside my body. I’ve broken, something has cracked, that must be it. Noise is coming up, coming out, of the broken place, in...

Gender roles suck,” says Swift Fox.Then you should stop playing them, thinks Toby.

Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It’s like the tide going out, revealing whatever’s been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans,...

There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.

The sun was up, the room already too warm. Light filtered in through the net curtains, hanging suspended in the air, sediment in a pond. My head felt like a sack of pulp. Still in...

Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings…but there’s something dead about it,...

To understand Homo sapiens’ primary wish list, go back to mythology. We endowed the gods with the abilities we wished we had ourselves: immortality and eternal youth, flight, resplendent beauty, total power, climate control, ultimate...

He’s lost something, some illusion I used to think was necessary to him. He’s come to realize he too is human. Or is this a performance, for my benefit, to show me he’s up-to-date? Maybe...

She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.In spirit she walks the city, traces its labyrinths, its dingy mazes: each assignation, each rendezvous, each door and stair and bed. What he said, what she...

I am a believer in sensible choices, so different from many of my own. Also in sensible names for children.

I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn’t simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination....

Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee… I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

Our problem right now is that we’re so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia...

Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn’t happen, but other planets.

I could end this with a moral,as if this were a fable about animals,though no fables are really about animals.

Men are not to be told anything they might find too painful; the secret depths of human nature, the sordid physicalities, might overwhelm or damage them. For instance, men often faint at the sight of...

… all this talking, this rather liquid confessing, was something I didn’t think I could ever bring myself to do. It seemed foolhardy to me, like an uncooked egg deciding to to come out of...

I’m not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don’t know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I...

We’ll choose knowledge no matter what, we’ll maim ourselves in the process, we’ll stick our hands into the flames for it if necessary. Curiosity is not our only motive; love or grief or despair or...

Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it’s time for you to become someone else’s...