I know what cancer was. How is it like humankind?" Sek Hardeen's perfectly modulated, softly accented tones showed a hint of agitation. "We have spread out through the galaxy like cancer cells through a living body, Duré. We multiply without thought to the countless life forms that must die or be pushed aside so that we may breed and flourish. We eradicate competing forms of intelligent life.

No book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.

Pain and darkness have been our lot since the Fall of Man. But there must be some hope that we can rise to a higher level ... that consciousness can evolve to a plane more benevolent than its counterpoint of a universe hardwired to indifference.

If everyone could understand the working of a psychopath's mind, we undoubtedly would be closer to insanity ourselves.

There were reprints of American editorials. Liberals saw it as a resurgence of social protest and decried the discrimination, poverty, and hunger that had provoked it. Conservative columnists acidly pointed out that hungry people don't steal stereo systems first and called for a crackdown in law enforcement. All of the reasoned editorials sounded hollow in light of the perverse randomness of the event. It was as if only a thin wall of electric lighting protected the great cities of the world from total barbarism.

It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.

Each heart has its graveyard, each household its dead, And knells ring around us wherever we tread, And the feet that awhile made our pathway so bright Pass on to a land that is out of our sight.