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I have now become something of an expert in the ways of "decisive" men. They are not firm, they just seem to be. Because they have a formula for everything, which they forcibly impose, they seem...

As we grown-ups talked and speculated, my five-year-old daughter looked intently out of the window. Suddenly she turned around and shouted, "Mommy, Mommy, he is not dead! Women are still wearing their...

Primo Levi once said, I write in order to rejoin the community of mankind. Reading is a private act, but it joins us across continents and time.

she felt secure only in her terrible sense of insecurity.

Curiosity, she said, is the purest form of rebellion.

That was the first time I experienced the desperate orgiastic pleasure of this form of public mourning: it was the one place where people mingled and touched bodies and shared emotions without...

We had always segregated sex from feeling and from intellectual love, so you were either pure and virtuous, as Nassrin's uncle had said, or dirty and fun. What was alien to us was eros, true...

Okay? You'll be a knockout. Listen, we'll buy a bottle of high-price Scotch and take it along. That Vat 69.' Frank

A message was sent by the regime to the faithful: to survive they would have to be loyal to only one interpretation of the faith, and to accept the new political role of the clergy. Father felt that...

But the magic comes from the power of good, from this force which tells us that we do not need to submit to the limits and restrictions imposed on us by Mr. Destin, as Nabokov calls him.

Disturbed and upset, Mrs. Pritchet gazed mutely out the window of the car and systematically abolished various categories. Old farmhouses with tottering windmills ceased to be. Ancient rusty...

You can’t do anything with your feelings, but you are able not to do the actions that you do.

What Dad didn't understand was that no matter how much he hated or feared the future, it was coming, and there was only one way to deal with it: by climbing aboard.

Chivalry wasn't dead, it's just that men didn't own all the horses anymore, and women of Helene's ilk didn't need that kind of rescue.

If I'm an andy," Phil Resch said, "and you kill me, you can have my squirrel. Here; I'll write it out, willing it to you.

Things change when you're not in danger anymore.

She is a tyrant much in the way of a bad novelist, who shapes his characters according to his own ideology or desires and never allows them the space to become themselves.

The baby went without a name for weeks. Mom said she wanted to study it first, the way she would the subject of a painting. We had a lot of arguments over what the name should be. I wanted to call her...

It is over, isn't it? Trustingly, he seemed to be waiting for her to tell him, as if she would know. As if hearing himself say it meant nothing; he had a dubious attitude toward his own words; they...

I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned...

It is impossible for a believer, no matter what his experience, to keep right with God if he will not take the trouble to spend time with God. Spend plenty of time with him; let other things go, but...

America," wrote Kilgore Trout in MTYOAP: "is the interplay of three hundred million Rube Goldberg contraptions invented only yesterday.

As for the learning itself, I figured you didn't need a college degree to become on of the people who knew what was really going on. If you paid attention, you could pick things up on your own.

Tolstoy said, 'The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed either by a change of life or by a change of conscience.' Many of us have elected to adjust our consciences rather than our...

She smiled innocuously-at variance with her words. At this point he could not discern her degree of seriousness. A topic of world-shaking importance, yet dealt with facetiously; an android trait,...

My friends, if we tend to the things that are important in life, if we are right with those we love and behave in line with our faith, our lives will not be cursed with the aching throb of unfulfilled...

fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

I used to joke that we had prepared ourselves for a time like this by living with Mother. The problem with such a state of affairs was not that you did not get to do what you wanted---sometimes you...

It is because these characters depend to such a high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a...

the dearer a book was to my heart, the more battered and bruised it became.

Those of us living in the Islamic Republic of Iran grasped both the tragedy and absurdity of thecruelty to which we were subjected. We had to poke fun at our own misery in order to survive.We also...

Again she repeated that she would never get married, never ever. She said that for her a man always existed in books, that she would spend the rest of her life with Mr. Darcy-even in the books, there...

Einstein was articulate and well-read, a lover of classical music, and it was he who said, I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge....