At what does the watermelon laugh,
when it is being murdered?

De que rie la sandía,
cuando la estan asesinando?

Where are the vineyards of iron
from where the meteor falls?

Donde estan las viñas de hierro,
de donde cae el meteoro?

Why does the hat of night
fly so full of holes?

Por qué el sombrero de la noche
vuela con tantos agujeros?

It wasn't a tornado but it was a heavy thundershower and the wheatfields turned to zinc as great trampling hissing sheets of rain advanced slowly across them.

It wasn't a tornado but it was a heavy thundershower and the wheatfields turned to zinc as great trampling hissing sheets of rain advanced slowly across them.

It wasn't a tornado but it was a heavy thundershower and the wheatfields turned to zinc as great trampling hissing sheets of rain advanced slowly across them.

Finally, I want to say that before I came to speak here I was told that the principle of TED Global is that a good speech should be like a mini-skirt: it should be short enough to arouse interest but long enough to cover the subject. I hope I have achieved that.

The hardest thing is to surround it, to fix its limit where it fades into the penumbra along its edge. To choose it from among the others, to separate it from the light that all shadows secretly, dangerously, breathe.

To begin to dress it casually, not moving too much, not frightening or dissolving it: this is the initial operation where nothingness lies in every move. The inner garments, the transparent corset, the stockings that compose a silky ascent up the thighs.

To all these it will consent in momentary ignorance, as if imagining it is playing with another shadow, but suddenly it will become troubled, when the skirt girds its waist and it feels the fingers that button the blouse between its breasts, brushing the neck that rises to disappear in dark flowing water. It will repulse the gesture that seems to crown it with a long blonde wig (that trembling halo around a nonexistent face!

And you must work quickly to draw its mouth with cigarette embers, slip on the rings and bracelets that define its hands, as it indecisively resists, its newborn lips murmuring the immemorial lament of one awakening to the world. It will need eyes, which must be made from tears, the shadow completing itself to better resist and negate itself.

Hopeless excitement when the same impulse that dressed it, the same thirst that saw it take shape from confused space, to envelop it in a thicket of caresses, begins to undress it, to discover for the first time the shape it vainly strives to conceal with hands and supplications, slowly yielding, to fall with a flash of rings that fills the night with glittering fireflies.

And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

…wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

Shit is the tofu of cursing.

Through the small tall bathroom window the December yard is gray and scratchy, the trees calligraphic.

We may disagree on recordings [of The Goldberg Variations] — Gould's 1981 has burned into my brain; listening to anything else is like wearing shoes a half-size off

The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the zipper on the fly of God Almighty.

Thomas Bihl, winner of a recent HORSE tournament, in which players have to show mastery of five different styles of poker, thinks the game has more in common with finance than it does with basic forms of gambling, because it requires the constant pricing and repricing of risk. Mr Bihl, a former stock trader, says the move from his old job into poker was a natural progression. Though his £71,000 win was “a huge lift”, he says that he is motivated not by money but by the chance to use his brain to outfox opponents. This is a common refrain among regular players. As Ms Coren put it in a recent article: “Cash is nothing more than chips, just the tools of the trade, like fishing rods to an angler. The game is all about money, and nothing to do with money.”

Already I regret listing all of these names. You now have little tic-tac-toe designs on your eyeballs. “Syriana” is exciting, fascinating, absorbing, diabolical and really quite brilliant, but I'm afraid it inspires reviews that are not helpful. The more you describe it, the more you miss the point. It is not a linear progression from problem to solution. It is all problem. The audience enjoys the process, not the progress. We're like athletes who get so wrapped up in the game we forget about the score.

Unscrupulous journalists looking for sensational headlines sometimes target cryonics by focusing on specific procedures, such as neuropreservation, and spinning them into lurid tales of wrongdoing. In one recent example, two small openings routinely made in the cranium for monitoring purposes using standard neurosurgical techniques became the story, “Head drilled full of holes!” The same kind of yellow journalism would describe a traditional funeral with the headline: “Funeral Home Scandal: Bodies injected with poison, organs mutilated, remains stuffed into wood boxes and covered with dirt!” Needless to say, this is the worst kind of tabloid journalism. It is both unfair and profoundly disrespectful to patients and their families.

A man who uses a great many words to express his meaning is like a bad marksman who, instead of aiming a single stone at an object, takes up a handful and throws at it in hopes he may hit.

Clocks are ads for time.

L’horologe fait de la réclame pour le temps.

Life is the strange loop of a snake releasing itself from its own grip, unmouthing an ever fattening tail tapering up to an ever increasingly large mouth, birthing an ever larger tail, filling the universe with this strangeness.