I'm writing a new love story, set in eastern North Carolina. Surprise, surprise, huh?
The cruelest thing anyone can do to Portnoy's Complaint is to read it twice.
Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind; it is a way of engaging reality.
The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.
Comedy speaks for civilization; farce bears an ill-concealed, sometimes unconcealed animus against civilization. Often against civility too.
The most glorious vision of the intellectual life is still that which is loosely called humanist: the idea of a mind committed yet dispassionate, ready to stand alone, curious, eager, skeptical. The banner of critical independence, ragged and torn though it may be, is still the best we have.
One great flaw in the reforming passion is that in its eagerness to remedy social wrongs it tends to neglect, certainly to undervalue, the experience of those whose lives it wishes to improve.
You mention the Navy, for example, and the fact that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets.
Heavenly bodies are nests of invisible birds.
You know how people are about not taking care of an animal; they consider it immoral and antiempathic. I mean, technically it's not a crime like it was right after WWT but the feeling's still there.
Earth Democracy connects people in circles of care, cooperation, and compassion instead of dividing them through competition and conflict, fear and hatred.