the waiter came, bringing the second course, pollo con ajillo, chicken with garlic. they would both stink frightfully when they were through, miss shaw thought; she would have to remember to buy some...
You cannot write if you do not read, the blind man said. You cannot eat if you do not chew. And you cannot play if you do not-he grabbed for the boy's hand-listen.
Only assholes put a nickname on their business card.
Isn't that what it means to be civilized? That you can wait to get what you want?
It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.
As life goes on, you will join other bands, some through friendship, some through romance, some through neighborhoods, school, an army. Maybe you will all dress the same, or laugh at your own private...
Alcohol provokes stupidity; opium provokes wisdom.
The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again.
It's all right for you, you and Danton. I have to go and stutter for two hours at the Jacobins and probably be knocked down again by maddened violin makers and trampled by all sorts of...
I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth...
Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy. There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that...
The further I wake into this life, the more I realize that God is everywhere and the extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary. Light is in both the broken bottle and...
Some genealogies claimed to be able to trace the Maclean ancestry even further back, going as far as Julius Caesar, and, in some cases, admittedly more tendentiously, to the ancient Celtic god of the...
I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kind of things. Also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace's arrival. But no, it's clog and slog and scootch, on the floor, in the...
He did not use these things anymore, and yet, the thought of letting them go made him sad. He felt they represented times in his life he could not recall without their presence. They represented...
Sometimes, she said, mostly to herself, I feel I do not know my children... It was a fleeting statement, one I didn't think she'd hold on to; after all, she had birthed us alone, diapered and fed us,...
... an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
Science has always said that it may not know everything now but it will know, eventually. But now we see that isn't true. It is an idle boast. As foolish, and as misguided, as the child who jumps off...
I've always kept the pleasurable habit of college times, stressing tickets and notes. Much of my notes of pride and prejudice, the heiress, the hill of the howling winds, Madame Bovary and Tom Jones...
there is a great choice that awaits us every day: whether we go around carving holes in others because we have been so painfully carved ourselves, or whether we let spirit play its song through our...
Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.
There becomes little doubt as to why power chooses to support power. Rwanda becomes invisible once again. We have nothing America wants.
Today I know this: when it comes time to take stock, the most painful wound is that of broken friendships; and there is nothing more foolish than to sacrifice a friendship to politics.
treasure is crisis, because what you get in the end is yourself.
That's us, he said. Those five nuts right there.Which one is me? I asked.The little deformed one, Zoe suggested.Oh, shut up.
A regime that wraps itself in the flag of truth fears truth most of all, for if its story is falsified to the slightest degree, its authority is gone.
In my view, suicide is not really a wish for life to end.'What is it then?'It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, but...
Used to be - in the old days - the media image roughly corresponded to reality. But now it's all reversed. The media image is the reality, and by comparison day-to-day life seems to lack excitement....
They just posture and pontificate. Nobody tests. Nobody does field research. Nobody dares to solve the problems-because the solution might contradict your philosophy, and for most people clinging to...
Grant liked kids-it was impossible not to like any group so openly enthusiastic about dinosaurs. Grant used to watch kids in museums as they stared open-mouthed at the big skeletons rising above them....
I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and...
We lived in a culture that denied any merit to literary works, considering them important only when they were handmaidens to something seemingly more urgent-namely ideology. This was a country where...
Unable to decipher or understand everything that was complicated or outside the box, infuriated with those who considered snakes within, the fundamentalists were forced to impose their rudimentary...
What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you...
We all had to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle.
If I turned towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I needed in order...
Hope for some means its loss for others; when the hopeless regain some hope, those in power--the...
The Red Lion was a four-ale bar with a handful of lowbrowed sons of toil who looked as though they...
if you don't understand something, you can't approximate it. You're really just guessing.
Why are they going to disappear him? I don't know. It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good...
Read me back the last line. 'Read me back the last line,' read back the corporal who could take...
Keep in mind that when we talk of a great painting we are not really talking about anything great....