If not as a true human, let me tell you as a Biologist, color of the skin does not define an individual’s intelligence – it does not define an individual’s ambitions - it does not define an individual’s dreams – and above all, it does not define an individual’s character.

You have the love and support of God and the angels, but only you can take responsibility for your life, for your dreams. Only you can make the daily choices needed that create the life you want to live.

Isn’t that what true romance issupposed to be about? Finding the person who’s your soul mate. Someone you dream about at night. Someone whose name is on your lips when you wake up in the morning.

The woman you thought you talked to was like one out of my novels, nothing more than a dream, and illusion I conjured to feel better. That’s all I ever will be, unable to be that woman in real life.

She didn’t watch the dead, ancient bone-chess cities slide under, or the old canals filled with emptiness and dreams. Past dry rivers and dry lakes they flew, like a shadow of the moon, like a torch burning.

If I have forfeited the ability to wonder so as not to offend the tenets of the culture, and if I have sacrificed warm dreams on the cold altar of conformity, it is likely because I have somewhere traded the marvel of the infinite for the malaise of the finite.

I glanced at George half naked in his towel, then at Barkley, completely naked in his . . . nothing. A vampire and a werewolf. I shook my head. It was obvious. I was having one of my Anita Blake dreams again.

Sooner or later we must leave our dream world and face up to the facts of God, sin, and judgment. The Bible says, “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God” [Romans 3:23 NIV].

In one timeless instant a complex impression, not of knowledge but of feeling, penetrated her awareness like an indelible dream. An imprint of evil and a preponderance of good, both crying that somehow it was meant to be. Then nothing, only the cold apathy of deepest space.

Envy: Instead of focusing on your own goals, your goal becomes throwing off the rails other people’s goals and at the end of the day you gain nothing but a mischievous satisfaction that you have destroyed someone’s dream