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You see this is a chair, but when you come to describe it, you do so from where you are positioned, and from your own perspective, and so you cannot say there is only one way of seeing a chair, can...

One of those mid -season twilights, when for a moment the air seems to condense in the summer and autumn.

{T}he most difficult part of the fight is not taking aim at the enemy, but rejecting his definition of you.

And so began the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran versus The Great Gatsby

These people," he had said with his inscrutable smile, "are different from us. They don't care about books and such things.

Under Colonel Korn's rule, the only people permitted to ask questions were those who never did. Soon the only people attending were those who never asked questions, and the sessions were discontinued...

A great novel hears your perceptions, makes you feel the complexity of life and individuals, and defends you from the hypocritical certainty of the validity of your opinions, in morality to watertight...

It was one of the only times in my teaching career that I got angry and showed it in class. I was young and inexperienced, and I thought certain standards were respected and understood.

The smoke from her cigarette passed beneath the nostrils of the brown and white girls, and their space-annihilating concupiscence seemed centered on mentholated smoke along.

Whatever we've said, friends, we're saying still-- such as it was, such as it is, such as it will be

The statue was of a nude woman playing a slide trombone. It was entitles, enigmatically, Evelyn and Her Magic Violin.

There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization.

After the revolution, almost all the activities one associated with being out in public-seeing movies, listening to music, sharing drinks or a meal with friends-shifted to private homes. It was...

She looked not so much composed as drawn inward. She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time.

...these sleepless nights, when oddly enough my concentration was high, fueled perhaps by the effort to ignore the all-engrossing threat of bombs and rockets.

May 4, 1985. I am packing for a short trip to New York to discuss the cat book with Brion. In the front room where the kittens are kept, Calico Jane is nursing one black kitten. I pick up my...

The complaint is the common human language

The white cat symbolizes the silvery moon prying into corners and cleansing the sky for the day to follow. The white cat is the cleaner or the animal that cleans itself, described by the Sanskrit word...

Rented a tent, a tent, a tent; Rented a tent, a tent, a tent. Rented a tent! Rented a tent! Rented a, rented a tent.

Some within the government and some former revolutionaries had finally realized that there was no way the Islamic regime could make us intellectuals vanish. In forcing us underground, it had also made...

The first thing Harvath removed was a sand-colored, modified Palafox 9mm SIG Sauer P226 pistol. It had bright green TRUGLO Tritium/Fiber-Optic Day/Night sights that allowed for fast target acquisition...

I turned on the flashlight; it cut a small circle of light from the darkness around me.

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 movement...

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...

There were many such instances, when expressions of sympathy could not be exchanged. What do you say to someone who is telling you about the rape and murder of virgins-I'm sorry, I feel your pain?

Empathy is Gasby's heart, like many other novels. There is nothing more reproven than being blind in the face of the problems and pains of others.

But I'm afraid you have it backward. It is better to live on one's feet than die on one's knees. That is the way the saying goes.

All you've got to do is lie there a few minutes and die a little.

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...

After all, it takes two to create a relationship, and when you make half the population invisible, the other half suffers as well.

The class went all right, and the ones after became easier. I was enthusiastic, naive and idealistic, and I was in love with my books.

The room was full when I walked in, but as soon as I took my place behind the desk, my nervousness left me.

We were, to borrow from Nabokov, to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic eye of fiction.