Extraordinary that those who command the perquisites of place are those most ready to ignore them! It is as if the blessings of Providence are specious, and notable only in their absence. Ah well, I...

I have transcended that phase in my intellectual growth where I discover humour in simple freakishness. What exists is real; therefore it is tragic, since wherever lives must die. Only fantasy, the...

Zoe also knew her stepmother did not love her. Or even like her very much. In truth, Zoe was pretty sure her stepmother hated her. Sheila treated her at worst as an irritant, at best as if she were...

But how had he died? Zoe knew that Gingernut was very young, even in hamster years. Could this be a hamster murder? she wondered. But what kind of person would want to murder a defenseless little...

When Americans fill a prescription, the price is routinely twice as much - sometimes ten times as much - as a Briton or a German would pay for precisely the same pills made in the same factory.

Americans are under no moral obligation to grant amnesty to people who have broken our laws. "The moral thing to do" is usually defined as "following the law." The fact that Democrats want 30 million...

But prior to about the year 1600, the verb "believe" had a very different meaning within Christianity as well as in popular usage. It did not mean believing statements to be true; the object of the...

Arisha noticed that all the greenery and trees were dying the more they walked on. They finally arrived at a large clearing of a hidden valley. But it was desert like, bounded by the foothills of the...

The twenty foot statue loomed over them. Jesus saw his goat-like hairy legs with hooves, and his muscular human torso covered with the fine scales of a serpentine Shining One. Along with Semjaza, he...

The heresy of one generation is the orthodoxy of the next generation.

An empty stomach is better than full and grief is better than happiness.

There seemed to be that same fierce quest after truth, the same unafraid penetration, the same feeling that character is beauty, no matter how sordid it may appear.

Listen, my friend, all forms that exist in God's universe can be found in the human figure. A man's body and face can tell everything he represents. So how could I ever exhaust my interest in it?

I twitched a smile, resisting the temptation to kick his teeth down his throat, and folded myself into the deck chair.

Half a year - maybe. Something like that. Rita did not look away. Part of her job was to help people look at what was coming. Dying could be lonely. A nurse was often an easier person to talk to than...

the house picked up again its long, slow project of decay.

I thought nothing. The surface of my mind was perfectly still. But under the surface there was a shifting and a stirring. I felt the great swell of the undercurrent. For years a wreck had sat in the...

When fear and cold turn you into a statue in your own bed, do not yearn for the pure and hard Truth to come to your rescue. What you need is the soft comfort of a story. The balsamic, soothing...

One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.

Philip had received little kindness in his life, and he was touched by the American's desire to help him: once when a cold kept him in bed for three days, Weeks nursed him like a mother. There was...

It seemed to him that all his life he had followed the ideals that other people, by their words or their writings, had instilled into him, and never the desires of his own heart. Always his course had...

He had talked of getting occupation of this sort so long that he had not the face to refuse outright, but the thought of doing anything filled him with panic. At last he declined the opportunity and...

Our policy is impossible to justify on rational grounds, which is why we've started invoking national security and other shibboleths.

I aspire to wisdom, my lady. I do not believe I possess it, not yet. But my lord Ptolemy Solon holds that happiness is the highest form of wisdom. I made a broad gesture. Today the sun is shining and...

What does it mean to be good?

So far as the facts in the case are concerned, Dr Howell and I had called our book a 'true' history.

She couldn't quite believe it, even after all these years. It was a phenomenon of stupendous and unjustifiably useless extravagance. Yet here it lay, soft and powdery, edibly pure.

There is nothing wrong with you. God asks the most of those he loves best.

In the evening, after we dance, he rarely returns to the throne; he dances with others or he moves from place to place through the room. The court thinks he is trying to be gracious, sharing his...

Ornon says, Ornon - who - always - has - something - to - say says, the Thieves of Eddis don't have breaking points. We have flash points instead, like gunpowder. That's what makes us dangerous. -...