The only true rule for cavalry is to follow the enemy as long as he retreats.
Are you pro- or anti-macassar?
He resented such questions as people do who have thought a great deal about them. The superficial and slipshod have ready answers, but those looking this complex life straight in the eye acquire a wealth of perception so composed of delicately balanced contradictions that they dread, or resent, the call to couch any part of it in a bland generalization. The vanity (if not outrage) of trying to cage this dance of atoms in a single definition may give the weariness of age with the cry of youth for answers the appearance of boredom.
"You don't believe in God," I said to Stein. "God is a word banging around in the human nervous system. He exists about as much as Santa Claus. " "Santa Claus has had a tremendous influence, exist or not. " "For children. " "Lots of saints have died for God with a courage that's hardly childish. " "That's part of the horror. It's all a fantasy. It's all for nothing. "
I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best -- it's all they'll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money -- provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don't need it.
The writer can only explore the inner space of his characters by perceptively navigating his own.
The trouble with treating people as equals is that the first thing you know they may be doing the same thing to you.
How people ignored each other before smartphones.
It would never occur to most of us that 'plants' say anything at all, except in terms of what we read into them, or try to use them for. Yet in their responses to this wonderfully rhythmic and varying earth they are the most expressive of all forms of life.
I vividly remember being 14. That was the age when I started to get happy: I started being a writer and stopped being a loser.
Where did the concept of "without borders" come from? No one had that concept until you saw Earth from space, illustrated not by a mapmaker who's color-coding political boundaries; it's illustrated by nature itself and there's land, there's ocean, there's atmosphere.