Affordances define what actions are possible. Signifiers specify how people discover those possibilities: signifiers are signs, perceptible signals of what can be done. Signifiers are of far more...

blissful as ignorance

Make no mistake. I take these children seriously. It is not possible to see too much in them, to overindulge your casual gift for the study of character. It is all there, in full force, charged waves...

My life is either/or. Either I chew regular gum or I chew sugarless gum. Either I chew gum or I smoke. Either I smoke or I gain weight. Either I gain weight or I run up the stadium step.'Sounds like a...

He was wondering if there was some cryptic, cultish mark on his door that told all the crazy people he'd have trouble saying no.

He had not liked the things taught to him in college. He had been taught a great deal about social responsibility, about a life of service and self-sacrifice. Everybody had said it was beautiful and...

He looked at the granite. To be cut, he thought, and made into walls. He looked at a tree. To be split and made into rafters. He looked at a streak of rust on the stone and thought of iron ore under...

We cannot say what they meant, for there are no words for their meaning, but we know it without words and we knew it then.

It meant nothing to him any longer, only a faint tinge of sadness--and somewhere within him, a drop of pain moving briefly and vanishing, like a raindrop on the glass of a window, its course in the...

Is Euclidian geometry true or is Riemann geometry true? He answered, The question has no meaning. As well ask whether the metric system is true and the avoirdupois system is false; whether Cartesian...

Areté implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency—or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an...

Yah-da, yah-da, yah-da, yah-da, yah, carburetor, gear ratio, compression, yah-da-yah, piston, plugs, intake, yah-da-yah, on and on and on. That is the romantic face of the classic mode. Dull, awkward...

Try to understand where you are going and where you are, and it seems like your life has no meaning. But when you look back, the patterns emerge, and if you project yourself forward starting from...

When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

He wasn't going to send her to any hospital. He knew that now. At a hospital they'd just start shooting her full of drugs and tell her to adjust. What they wouldn't see is that she is adjusting....

The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself.

It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top.

I don't want to be defined by this.

The living deserve attention, too

Life is a perpetual yesterday for us.

I live in a world where two truths coexist: where both hell and hope lie in the palm of my hand

She had not planned to weep - it was the last thing from her mind, a display of mawkish weakness - but she could not help it.

I was a structuralist at the age of seven, which is about the right age for it.

It takes curiosity to find your call to adventure, it takes courage to venture into the unknown, and it takes imagination to create your path.

George Washington chopped down the tree, and then he threw away the money. Do you understand? He was telling us an essential truth. Namely, that money doesn't grow on trees. This is what made our...

We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and...

This process, one of trading the state to outside owners in exchange for their now seemingly entirely temporary agreement to enrich us, in other words the pauperization of California, had in fact...

You talk crazy any more and I'll leave. Leave. For Christ's sake leave. She would not take her eyes from the dry wash. All right. Don't, he would say then. Don't. Why do you say those things? Why do...

Janis Joplin is singing with Big Brother in the Panhandle and almost everybody is high and it is a pretty nice Sunday afternoon.

Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.