Pretty dresses, desperate hearts.

A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talk show host with an orange face... It didn't add up. Suicide wasn't invented for people like this....

The crowd was itself. There was no swaying it, squeezing through or reasoning with it. You breathed with it and you sang its songs. You waited for its fire.

We have to live without sympathy, don't we? That's impossible of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren't like that really, I mean... one can't be out in the cold all the...

Our democracy cannot survive its current downward drift into tribalism, extremism, and seething resentment. Today it's "us versus them" in America. Politics is little more than blood sport. As a...

Scarlett, when you are forty-five, perhaps you will know what I'm talking about and then perhaps you, too, will be tired of imitation gentry and shoddy manners and cheap emotions. But I doubt it. I...

Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything.

a tribe is nothing more than a coalition of people working together as equals to make a living.

And confronting these men, wild and terrible as we agree that they were, there were men of quite another kind, smiling and adorned with ribbons and stars, silk stockinged, yellow gloved and with...

Your money or your life!

For anyone of a rational disposition, fashion is often nearly impossible to fathom. Throughout many periods of history - perhaps most - it can seem as if the whole impulse of fashion has been to look...

What white Americans do not face when they regard a Negro reality - the fact that life is tragic. Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for...

Tell me... is there really no other way for you but this? To kneel down forever before an army of boys for just five dirty minutes in the dark? Think... of the men who have kneled before you while you...

Other people, too, worried about this new gap between the speeds of travel and messaging. An important London banker told Babbage he disapproved: "It will enable our clerks to plunder us, and then be...

No one paid any attention to how things looked, and as they moved faster and faster everything grew uglier and dirtier, and as everything grew uglier and dirtier they moved faster and faster, and at...

almost fanatically, began to see another man, and although she still clung on to Williams for his money, it was quite obvious to him that she didn't love him

No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes: yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes,...

Why should people have money if they don't know how to use it?

There was something to be said for dying before you ended up in incontinence pads, watching an endless loop of reruns of Friends.

He has added inches and fullness to his beard since his last visit. I'll say no more.

Wrong takes an awful long time to be proven, in my experience.

The more civilized we become, the more horrendous our entertainments.

We are living in an interdependent world where what our children hear, see, feel, and learn will affect how they grow up and who they turn out to be.

From a certain height, everyone looks the same - men, women, villains, kings - as if rank and fortune were simply an accident of perspective.

People grieve in different ways, some silently, some in anger, some in spite. Rarely does grief bring out the best in people, despite what local historians like to tell you.

There is no guarantee that networked information technology will lead to the improvements in innovation, freedom, and justice that I suggest are possible. That is a choice we face as a society. The...

Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second - to - least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society...

I started a new page and wrote a title at the top: "Ten Ways to Defeat Macho Dickheadism." Then I realized that most of the world's problems stemmed from macho dickheadism, and if I could defeat that...

LeCedrick Earle was maybe an inch shorter than me, with dark glossy skin and a shaved head. He was wearing a prison - issue orange jumpsuit and Keds. I said, That's right. I work for an attorney named...

These young men, in other words, represented a variety of types, but one thing they had in common was that they'd all given up on committing positively to anything in life. This was not their fault,...