Brightest truth, purest trust in the universe, all were for me, in the kiss of one girl.
I believe that culture begins in the cradle. . . To do without tales and stories and books is to lose humanity's past, is to have no star map for our future.
But as the scissors snip-snapped through her hair and the razor shaved the rest, she realized with a sudden awful panic that she could no longer recall anything from the past. I cannot remember, she whispered to herself. I cannot remember. She's been shorn of memory as brutally as she'd been shorn of her hair, without permission, without reason. . . Gone, all gone, she thought again wildly, no longer even sure what was gone, what she was mourning.
Intuition works best when you remember that “tuition” is part of it. You need to have paid ahead of time (ie done your prep work) so as to prepare the ground for intuition.
Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks.
Know, my son, that the enemy will always be with you. He will be in the shadow of your dreams and in your living flesh, for he is the other part of yourself.
Write, write, and write some more. Think of writing as a muscle that needs lots of exercise.
People must be protected from prejudice against their person. But people cannot be protected from prejudice against their ideas - because otherwise we're all done.
What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises.
…she'll go and fall in love, and there's an end of peace and fun, and cozy times together.
The freedom to criticize judges and other public officials is necessary to a vibrant democracy.