Pro football is like nuclear warfare. There are no winners, only survivors.
Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.
The wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as asults, to our grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers off the hook for their not meeting our every need. Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.
Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.
There is always a. . belief that by destroying the thing that we love we destroy our needs
Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.
Sanity, as the project of keeping ourselves recognizably human, therefore has to limit the range of human experience. To keep faith with recognition we have to stay recognizable. Sanity, in other words, becomes a pressing preoccupation as soon as we recognize the importance of recognition. When we define ourselves by what we can recognize, by what we can comprehend- rather than, say, by what we can describe- we are continually under threat from what we are unwilling andor unable to see. We are tyrannized by our blind spots, and by whatever it is about ourselves that we find unacceptable.
I have often thought how little I should like to have to prove organic evolution in a court of law.
I think the picture in Jet magazine showing Emmett Till's mutilation was probably the greatest media product in the last forty or fifty years because that picture stimulated a lot of interest and anger on the part of blacks all over the country.
And then it was, that grief and pain made themselves known to me as never before. Note this, because I knew the full absurdity of Fate and Fortune and Nature more truly than a human can bear to know it. And perhaps the description of this, brief as it is, may give consolation to another. The worst takes its time to come, and then to pass. The truth is, you cannot prepare anyone for this, nor convey an understanding of it through language. It must be known. And this I would wish on no one in the world.
Passing my motorcycle theory test gave me a disproportionate feeling of greatness.