Love, supreme power of the heart, mysterious enthusiasm that encloses in itself all poetry, all heroism, all religion!
I sat down next to her. Took her hand. This can work, I said. All we have to do is try.
I think the average guy thinks they're pro-woman, just because they think they're a nice guy and someone has told them that they're awesome. But the truth is far from it.
I never hear white writers get asked, 'Do you worry about how you represent white people?'
I always wanted to read. I always thought I was going to be a historian. I would go to school and study history and then end up in law school, once, I ran out of loot trying to be a history high school teacher. But my dream was always to place myself in a situation where I was always surrounded by books.
I look most like myself. . . when I'm wearing my black, nerdy engineering glasses.
I always think about myself as a writer; that comes out of being a reader first, and I don't think I kind of got to really playing with language in any formal way probably until I was in my mid-twenties.
You're always trying to find new stuff and new inspiration. If you don't really push and you don't try something that feels exciting, then it's not worth doing.
I throw fresh seeds out. Who knows what survives?
From what deep springs of character our personal philosophies issue, we cannot be sure. In philosophers themselves we seem always able to notice some deep internal correspondence between the man and his philosophy. Are our philosophies, then, merely the inevitable outcome of the body of fate and personal circumstance that is thrust upon each of us? Or are these beliefs the means by which we freely create ourselves as the persons we become? Here, at the very outset, the question of freedom already hovers in the background.
The god which the vast majority of professing Christians love is looked upon very much like an indulgent old man, who himself has no relish for folly, but leniently winks at the indiscretions of youth. . . For one sin God banished our first parents from Eden; for one sin all the posterity of Canaan fell under a curse which remains over them to this day; for one sin Moses was excluded form the promised land; Elisha’s servant smitten with leprosy; Ananias and Sapphira were cut off from the land of the living.