Even though comfort based on an illusion is itself illusory, it is for a while a deliverance from the anxiety and existential dread that the world today can generate in abundance.
Mr. Vanadium, your quarter trick is really cool. But here’s something out of Heinlein.
Killing and murder are different things, and killing evil men to prevent them from murdering others is not wicked work.
Woodbine motions for Harris to lower the weapon and says to Michael, “This conversation is between you and me.
Or his conscience had been eaten away by the cancer of narcissism.
Failure to be prepared is a failure to hope.
No hamlet in America remains so safe that Beaver Cleaver can ride his bike into the evening without at least some risk of being abducted, raped, beheaded, and discarded in a dump.
Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility. – James Thurber.
Avatars do not make a community; they are shadows of people, not people.
Nihilism. It works. Looks like you live by it, too.
I only take from nihilists. Doesn’t make me one.
However, she’s now been reminded of what she never should have forgotten – that the true prince of this world isn’t Moloch. The prince of this world is the father of lies, and his followers are legion. Those who control the narrative.
Because the wicked often have a charisma that the naive view as godliness, rather than demonic suasion, some miscreants for a time raise mass movements in their defense.
Hope is a hand extended, but two hands are required to be pulled out of a deep hole. The second hand was faith – the faith that her hope would be borne out;.
Nor did he grow impatient about the delay, for impatience was a characteristic of those who didn’t understand that time flowed to a purpose that neither impatience nor haste could change for the better, though often for the worse.
Every year in this war and that, even in our own cities, countless children are killed, while those who spray the bullets – or plant the roadside bomb, authorize the use of nerve gas, send the drone with the Hellfire missile that strikes the wrong target – shed not a tear, referring to those tender deceased as mere “collateral damage,” if they acknowledge.
Simple pleasures are no less pleasurable than costlier pursuits. Pleasure is all in the heart, a matter of delight rather than dollars. A faithful dog can provide more joyful moments than a yacht. It’s only envy, a sickness of the mind, that causes disdain of simple things and greatly overvalues extravagance.
The one project-staff member on the duty roster not yet accounted for is the head of security, Michael Mace.
She can be bent so severely that it doesn’t seem as though she can ever straighten herself out again, but she always does. She gets on with getting on.
Following the three-lane blacktop, Nina knows what the rain and the night conceal. Grassy hills rise in the east, and beyond the hills lies the lesser desert, and beyond the first desert waits the true and more barren desert. To the west is woven a webwork of small cities and suburbs that crowd the shores of the sea, far from LA but bustling with commerce and compulsion, with ecstasy and horror, grace and cruelty, where most people are time ridden and wearier than they might know.