Ondaatje

"Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross."
Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero
January 28, 2012

Bailey

"There is a certain depth of illness that is piercing in its isolation; the only rule of existence is uncertainty, and the only movement is the passage of time. One cannot bear to live through another loss of function, and sometimes friends and family cannot bear to watch. An unspoken, unbridgeable divide may widen. Even if you are still who you were, you cannot actually fully be who you are. Sometimes the people you know well withdraw, and then even the person you know as yourself begins to change."
Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating
September 26, 2011

Coehlo

"Love was above everything else, and there was no hatred in love, only the occasional mistake."
Paulo Coelho, Brida: A Novel
September 8, 2011

Coelho

"...finding one important thing in your life doesn't mean you have to give up all the other important things."
Paulo Coehlo, Brida: A Novel
September 8, 2011

Coelho

"Get rid of the clothes that were not intended for you,... And wear all the others. It's important to keep the soil turned, the waves crashing, and all your emotions in movement. The whole Universe is moving all the time, and we must do likewise."
Paulo Coehlo, Brida: A Novel
September 7, 2011

Coelho

"An anonymous text from the Tradition says that, in life, each person can take one of two attitudes: to build or to plant. The builders might take years over their tasks, but one day, they finish what they're doing. Then they find they're hemmed in by their own walls. Life loses its meaning when the building stops.

Then there are those who plant. They endure storms and all the many vicissitudes of the seasons, and they rarely rest. But, unlike a building, a garden never stops growing. And while it requires the gardener's constant attention, it also allows life for the gardener to be a great adventure.

Gardeners always recognize one another, because they know that in the history of each plant lies the growth of the whole World."

Paul Coehlo, Brida: A Novel
September 4, 2011

Keneally

"History is everything. People will not in the end forgive you for not having shared theirs."
Thomas Keneally, Woman of the Inner Sea
September 27, 2010

Roth

"The light and the heat of the day (that blessing), the unchanging quiet of each cow's life as it paralleled that of all the others, the enamored old man studying the suppleness of the efficient, energetic woman, the adulation rising in him, his looking as though nothing more stirring had ever before happened to him, and, too, my own willing waiting, my own fascination with their extensive disparity as human types, with the nonuniformity, the variability, the teeming irregularity of sexual arrangements-- and with the injunction upon us, human and bovine, the highly differentiated and the all but undifferentiated, to live, not merely to endure but to live, to go on taking, giving, feeding, milking, acknowledging wholeheartedly, as the enigma that it is, the pointless meaningfulness of living-- all was recorded as real by tens of thousands of minute impressions. The sensory fullness, the copiousness, the abundant--superabundant--detail of life, which is the rhapsody."-- Phillip Roth, The Human Stain
June 1, 2010

Naylor

"Yeah, the Flying Dutchman would definitely have been good enough to join one of those teams; they grow 'em tough up there in Mansfield, Pennsylvania. He could have made it with no rest--in body or mind--and still brought in a batting average of .327 while transforming himself into a golden shield between second and third bases. He'd been just like Pop Lloyd in that respect. And it leaves me confused, why these newspapermen look back and Pop's career and call him the black Honus Wagner; all things being equal--or in this case unequal--the highest compliment to pay the Flying Dutchman is to call him the white Pop Lloyd. And I'll even bring Ty Cobb into that club, although he'd play dirty and spike a man in a second: he's the White Oscar Charleston if there's ever been one. Those other players, now, those others just couldn't have made it. And no, I haven't forgotten the Babe. Too temperamental. He couldn't have gone two seasons in Josh Gibson's shoes and held to his record, and so far as I am concerned, the title of a White Josh Gibson still goes unclaimed."
Gloria Naylor, Bailey's Cafe
April 7, 2009

Debbie

"I love the gay community. For those that don't you are missing out on a lot of love."
Debbie
August 11, 2008

Olbermann

"There's a false concept of balance that Rupert Murdoch and Fox News have successfully pushed: Everybody has to be left or right; every argument has to be countered. That's "fair and balanced." It's really the moral relativism they always complain about, applied to journalism. If you say a falling coffee cup will shatter on the floor, that must be "balanced" by someone saying no, it will fly upward into the hand of God. Nonsense! But if you put this nonsense on television, it gains credibility. You can say TV is crap, but the most authenticating thing in the world is "I saw it on TV.""
Keith Olbermann
Playboy Magazine, October 2007

Bennett

"The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out, and taken yours."


April 3, 2008

Pratchett

"Chess in particular had always annoyed him. It was the dumb way the pawns went off and slaughtered their fellow pawns while the kings lounged about doing nothing that always got to him; if only the pawns united, maybe talked the rooks around, the whole board could've been a republic in a dozen moves."



March 13, 2008

Pratchett

"Do not...what do they call it...go postal? Treat this as a learning exercise. Find out why the world is not as you thought it was. Assemble the facts, digest the information, consider the implications. Then go postal. But with precision."


March 13, 2008

Pratchett

"He knew in his heart that spinning upside down around a pole wearing a costume you could floss with definitely was not Art, and being painted lying on a bed wearing nothing but a smile and a small bunch of grapes was good solid Art, but putting your finger on why this was the case was a bit tricky."



March 13, 2008

Wilson

"Truths only seem good since they can seem useful for our own success, which we value as good. Truth is only what we ought to believe if we want to succeed. To a pragmatist, truth is what we ought to assume. I do not necessarily endorse the Cartesian sense of uncertainty, but certainly we, as responsible philosophers, must ask more of ourselves than usefulness to necessitate truth."
Charles Wilson
Paper for my Introduction to Philosophy class, 2/25/2008
March 4, 2008

Pratchett

"As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up."


March 2, 2008

Hardy

"I am now about to pass into my normal condition. For people are almost always in their graves. When we survey the long race of men, it is strange and still more strange to find that they are mainly dead men, who have scarcely ever been otherwise."


January 29, 2008

Pham

"Two people in love is their worlds becoming one, each person's heart is the other's pillow."
Bao Tram Pham, philosophy paper for my introduction to philosophy class
December 9, 2007

Pasternak

"That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden by my doctors, my stomach won't take it."


September 26, 2007

Potok

"Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye? I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that the blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning."


August 27, 2007

Bragg

"Any jackass can be pleasant company, but if people help you when you're at your worst, that's a friend."


July 8, 2007

Bragg

"It is a failing of pampered intellectuals that they assume everyone at their table is as civilized as they are."


July 8, 2007

Bragg

"There is a notion, a badly mistaken one among comfortable people, that you do not miss what you never had. I have written that line myself, which is shameful to me now. I, of all people, should know better, should know that being poor does not make you blind to the riches around you; that living in other folks' houses for a lifetime does not mean a person does not dream of a house of his or her own, even if it is just a little one."


July 5, 2007

Bragg

"After all the dying I have seen, I finally understand what death is: simple wanting."


July 5, 2007

Kosinski

"I have found people to be good everywhere,... They turn bad only when they fall for little bits of power tossed to them by the state or by a political party, by a union or a company, or a wealthy mate. They forget that their power is nothing more than a temporary camouflage of mortality."


May 24, 2007

Allende

"In the end, the only thing we have in abundance is the memory we have woven. Each of us chooses the tone for telling his or her own story; I would like to choose the durable quality of a platinum print, but nothing in my destiny possessed that luminosity."


May 22, 2007

Beah

""We must strive to be like the moon." An old man in Kabati repeated this sentence often to people who walked past his house on their way to the river to fetch water, to hunt, to tap palm wine; and to their farms. I remember asking my grandmother what the old man meant. She explained that the adage served to remind people to always be on their best behavior and to be good to others. She said that people complain when there is too much sun and it gets unbearably hot, and also when it rains too much or when it is cold. But, she said, no one grumbles when the moon shines. Everyone becomes happy and appreciates the moon in their own special way. Children watch their shadows and play in its light, people gather at the square to tell stories and dance through the night. A lot of happy things happen when the moon shines. These are some of the reasons we should want to be like the moon."


March 9, 2007

Rushdie

"But maybe the truth is that, as he used to say, our human tragedy is that we are unable to comprehend our experience, it slips through our fingers, we can't hold on to it, and the more time passes, the harder it gets. Maybe too much time has passed for you, and you will have to accept, I'm sorry to say it, that there are things about your experience you will never understand. My father said that the natural world gave us explanations to compensate for the meanings we could not grasp. The slant of the cold sunlight on a winter pine, the music of water, an oar cutting the lake and the flight of birds, the mountains' nobility, the silence of the silence. We are given life but must accept that it is unattainable and rejoice in what can be held in the eye, the memory, the mind."


February 17, 2007

Rushdie

"Man is ruined by the misfortune of possessing a moral sense... Consider the superior luck of the animals... They neither know nor shape their own nature; rather, their natures knows and shapes them. There are no surprises in the animal kingdom. Only Man's character is suspect and shifting. Only Man, knowing good, can do evil. Only Man wears masks. Only Man is a disappointment to himself."


February 17, 2007

Rushdie

"The universe flexed its muscles and demonstrated its complete lack of interest in quarrels about its nature. The universe was everything at once, science and sorcery, what was occult and what was known, and it didn't give a damn."


February 17, 2007

Rushdie

"That it was a desert in disguise caused him to celebrate the genius of human beings, their ability to populate the earth with their imaginings, to bring water to the wilderness and bustle to the void; that the desert had its revenge on the complexions of its conquerors, drying them, ingraining lines and furrows, provided those triumphant mortals with the salutary lesson that no victory was absolute, that the struggle between earthlings and the earth could never be decided in favor of either combatant, but swung back and forth through all eternity."


February 17, 2007

Weinstein, Barber

"There are very few things that are certain in this lifetime, but here is one of them: I will get tired of throwing the ball long before the dogs are tired of chasing after it."


January 21, 2007

Helprin

"The more you read, the more the world opens up to you in a place like this, and the happier you are and the more comforted you feel. It's up to you. No one is uneducated who cannot educate himself."


September 29, 2006

Helprin

"A good river is nature's work in song."


September 29, 2006

Helprin

"Marriage is, among other things, having someone deeply and unreasonably on your side..."


September 29, 2006

Helprin

"There is such a thing as art, grounded in a universal language derived from all human experience and the absolutes of nature, and when you destroy the limitations and definitions of art by the inclusion-- via strict decree-- of absolutely everything, you destroy civilization. Or didn't you know that?"


September 29, 2006

Helprin

"When in winter the natural world was inhospitable, by comparison, the works of man shone like gold."


September 27, 2006

Corvino

"...using the Bible's condemnation of homosexuality against contemporary homosexuality is like using its condemnations of usury against contemporary banking."
John Corvino
"Why Shouldn't Tommy and Jim Have Sex?"
March 3, 2006

Corvino

"Sex with adults of the same sex is one thing; sex with children of the same sex is quite another. Conflating the two not only slanders innocent people, it also misdirects resources intended to protect children."
John Corvino
"Why Shouldn't Tommy and Jim Have Sex?"
March 3, 2006

Corvino

"...the charge that homosexuality is unnatural, at least in its most common forms, is longer on rhetorical flourish than on philosophical cogency. At best it expresses an aesthetic judgment, not a moral judgment."
John Corvino
"Why Shouldn't Tommy and Jim Have Sex?"
March 3, 2006

Lahane

"Beauty could do that; it scared you off, made you keep your distance. It wasn't like in the movies where the camera made beauty seem like something that invited you in. In the real world, beauty was like a fence to keep you out, back you off."


March 14, 2005

Kidd

"People who think dying is the worst thing don't know a thing about life."


January 6, 2005

Clarke

"Whoever heard of cats doing anything useful! Except for staring at one in a supercilious manner," said Strange. That has a sort of moral usefulness. I suppose, in making one feel uncomfortable and encouraging sober reflection upon one's imperfections."


Novemver 27, 2004

Hobbes

"That much may perhaps make such equality incredible is but a vain conceit of one's own wisdom, which almost all men think they have in a greater degree than the vulgar-- that is, than all men but themselves and a few others whom, by fame or by concurring with themselves, they approve. For such is the nature of men that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty or more eloquent or more learned, yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves; for they see their own wit at hand and other men's at a distance."


October 20, 2004

Martel

"If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams."


October 19, 2004

Caldwell, Thomason

"I'd begun to realize that there was an unspoken prejudice among book-learned people, a secret conviction they all seemed to share, that life as we know it is an imperfect vision of reality, and that only art, like a pair of reading glasses, can correct it."


September 26, 2004

Suskind

"A lesson O'Neill had learned in his days running OMB, and never forgot, was that the budget is often the only place where there is a true competition of disparate ideas-- a competition over who will get the money and won't. And the only way for that competition to work is for the budget to be finite. A ballooning deficit-- he'd often tell cabinet secretaries or department heads, who feared his visits-- is a sign of casual thinking and tough choices not made. Balancing a budget, thereby, is not just a matter of fiscal good sense. It compels comparison virtues-- such as intellectual rigor and honest assessment of the intentions that underlie action. Do you know what you're doing-- and do you know why?"


February 18, 2004

Suskind

"Administrations are defined by their President," O'Neill said, And while it was already apparent to many inside the administration that this President ceded significant authority to others, he was "clearly signing on to strong ideological positions that had not been fully thought through. But, of course, that's the nature of ideology. Thinking it through is the last thing an ideologue wants to do.""


February 17, 2004

O'Neill

"You only have that [credibility] when you bring together the strongest voices from opposite poles. Otherwise, the outcomes are suspect. If you want to be seen as open and honest, you've got to do the hard work of bringing combatants together, and then just see how things sort out. What does the data say? That last part is not something you can control."


February 17, 2004

O'Neill

"Our political system is what needs fixing... It needs to be based on reality. Not games."

February 14, 2004

Suskind

"O'Neill was a believer in the middle ground. Not in compromise, so much. Or horse trading. He was never much on any of that. It was the fresh, unaffiliated idea that enlivened him. Across four decades of search and study in and near government, he was sure he'd spotted a staid, stoic truth beneath the heat lightning of political rhetoric: that on matters of policy there are answers-- right answers-- that eventually assert their primacy over political posturing. These right answers fall indiscriminately, here and there, along the left/right political axis, or create a new territory not yet charted. An idea's first conceptual mold tends to form through plodding rigor, from a clear-eyed examination of available evidence and an open-minded-- and sometimes humbling-- assessment of opposing views. Fierce, frank dialogue commences; choices and consequences take shape. And, if everyone is honest about what they all know-- and about what they've learned in this roiling process-- an answer, a best remedy, emerges. Illusion will have its moment, but there is, in fact, a discernible underlying reality. It make take awhile, but in the end that reality becomes visible and undeniable. In the end, it's all about process, O'Neill believed. Trust process and the ends will take care of themselves."


February 14, 2004

Suskind

"When this project officially began in February 2003, I was heartened, though not surprised, to find that Paul O'Neill had a striking view of the value of secrecy-- that it had almost no value. We both happened to have read the 1998 by by Daniel Patrick Moynihan; a friend and mentor to O'Neill, who wrote that twenty years on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had taught him a single, sterling lesson: The threat to our national security is not from secrets revealed, it's from bad analysis."


February 14, 2004

McEwen

"Understanding a line of melody was a complex mental act, but it was one even an infant could perform; we were born into an inheritance, we were Homo musicus; defining beauty in music must therefore entail a definition of human nature, which brought us back to the humanities and communicativeness..."


January 20, 2004

Vachss

"When we find evil and violence coalescing within an individual, then the only sane self-protective goal is incarceration. To do that consistently rather than episodically we need to take the self-interest out f collaboration. And we need to look at what we are doing to spawn such sympathies.
We have allowed sex crimes to be the one area of criminality where we judge the offense not by the perpetrator but by the victim. There is an essential difference between sex crimes and other crimes, but it has nothing to do with victims. Most other crime is in response to a need that the offense itself seeks to meet. (Some) people kill because they are angry. (Some) people steal because they want money. But as each rape is committed, it creates a greater need. Rape is dose-related-- it is chronic, repetitive... and always escalating.
Rapists cross a line-- a clear, bright line. Absent specific, significant, predictable consequences, they are never going to cross back. Too often, instead of consequences what we give them is permission.
Collaboration is a hate crime. When a jury in Florida acquits because the victim was not wearing underpants, when a grand jury in Texas refuses to indict because as AIDS-fearing victim begged the rapist to use a condom, when a judge in Manhattan imposed a lenient sentence because the rape of a retarded, previously victimized teenager wasn't "violent," when an appellate defense attorney vilifies a young woman on National TV for the "crime" of having successfully prosecuted a rape complaint, when a judge in Wisconsin calls a five-year-old "seductive"-- all that is collaboration, and it is antipathy towards victims so virulent that it subjects us all to risk."


December 31, 2003

Vachss

"People who think rape is about sex confuse the weapon with the motivation."


December 31, 2003

Vachss

"I never believed that prison atrocities were some twisted form of justice. The ugly abuse of power doesn't become less offensive when its victims are less sympathetic."


December 31, 2003

MacDonald

"Opera isn't supposed to be pretty. Women stabbing themselves and everyone else half the time isn't pretty, it's wild, it's passionate and gruesome and beautiful and you can't tell me such women don't snarl as much as they sing. And that's not counting the comic roles, which are even more grotesque."


December 29, 2003

MacDonald

"The thief you must fear the most is not the one who steals mere things."


December 29, 2003

MacDonald

"How unhappy are they who have a gift that's left to germinate in darkness. The pale plant will sink invisible roots and live whitely off their blood."


December 29, 2003

Bragg

"Any woman can appreciate a pretty man, but not every woman can appreciate a talking one."


October 7, 2003

Douglas, Olshaker

"I'd far rather potential criminals had less access to handguns than to Kojak."


September 15, 2003

Krakauer

"There are some ten thousand extant religious sects-- each with its own cosmology, each with its own answer for the meaning of life and death. Most assert that the other 9,999 not only have it completely wrong but are instruments of evil, besides. None of the ten thousand has yet persuaded me to make the requisite leap of faith. In the absence of conviction, I've come to terms with the fact that uncertainty is an inescapable corollary of life. An abundance of mystery is simply part of the bargain-- which doesn't strike me as something to lament. Accepting the essential inscrutability of existence, in any case, is surely preferable to its opposite: capitulating to the tyranny of intransigent belief."


September 4, 2003

Krakauer

"There is a dark side to religious devotion that is too often ignored or denied. As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane-- as a means for inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the devout-- there may be no more potent force than religion. When the subject of religiously inspired bloodshed comes up, many Americans immediately think of Islamic fundamentalism, which is to be expected in the wake of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. But men have been committing heinous acts in the name of God ever since mankind began believing in deities, and extremists exist within all religions. Muhammed is not the only prophet whose words have been used to sanction barbarism; history has not lacked for Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, and even Buddhists who have been motivated by scripture to butcher innocents. Plenty of these religious extremists have been homegrown, corn-fed Americans.
Faith-based violence was present long before Osama bin Laden, and it will be with us long after his demise. Religious zealots like bin Laden, David Koresh, Jim Jones, Shako Asahara, and Dan Lafferty are common to every age, just as zealots of other stripes are. In any human endeavor, some fraction of its practitioners will be motivated to pursue their activity with such concentrated focus and unalloyed passion that it will consume them utterly. One has to look no further than individuals who feel compelled to devote their lives to becoming concert pianists, say, or climbing Mount Everest. For some, the province of the extreme holds an allure that's irresistible. And a certain percentage of such fanatics will inevitably fixate on matters of the spirit.
The zealot may be outwardly motivated by the anticipation of a great reward at the other end-- wealth, fame, eternal salvation-- but the real recompense is probably the obsession itself. This is no less true for the religious fanatic than for the fanatical pianist or fanatical mountain climber. As a result of his (or her) infatuation, existence overflows with purpose. Ambiguity vanishes from the fanatic's world view; a narcissistic sense of self-assurance displaces all doubt. A delicious rage quickens his pulse, fueled by the sins and shortcomings of lesser mortals, who are soiling the world wherever he looks. His perspective narrows until the last remnants of proposition are shed from his life. Through immoderation, he experiences something akin to rapture.
Although the far territory of the extreme can exert an intoxicating pull on susceptible individuals of all bents, extremism seems to be especially prevalent among those inclined by temperament or upbringing toward religious pursuits. Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component to spiritual devotion. And when religious fanaticism supplants rationalization, all bets are suddenly off. Anything can happen. Absolutely anything. Common sense is no match for the voice of God..."


September 4, 2003

Dostoyevsky

"Tyranny is a habit; it is able to, and does develop finally into a disease. I submit that habit may coarsen and stupefy the very best of man to the level of brutes. Blood and power make a man drunk: callous coarseness and depravity develop in him; the most abnormal phenomena become accessible, and in the end pleasurable to the mind and senses. The human being and the citizen perish forever in the tyrant, and a return to human dignity, to repentance, to regeneration becomes practically impossible for him. What is more, the example, the possibility of such intransigence have a contagious effect upon the whole of society: such power is a temptation. A society which can look upon such a phenomenon with indifference is already contaminated to its foundations. Put briefly, the right given to one man to administer corporal punishment to another is one of society's running sores, one of the most effective means of destroying in it every attempt at, every embryo of civic consciousness, and a basic factor in its certain and inexorable dissolution."


August 13, 2003

Dostoyevsky

"Everyone, whoever he is and however lowly the circumstances into which he has been pushed, demands, albeit instinctively and unconsciously, that respect be shown for his human dignity. The convict knows he is a convict, an outcast, and he knows his place vis-a-vis his superior officer; but no brands, no fetters will ever be able to make him forget that he is a human being. And since he really is a human being, it is necessary to treat him as one."


August 13, 2003

Dostoyevsky

"Some people say (I have heard this and read it) that the most elevated love of one's neighbor is at one and the same time the greatest egoism."


August 2, 2003

Dostoyevsky

"The thought once occurred to me that if one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment, one at which the most fearsome murderer would tremble, shrinking from it in advance, all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning."


July 30, 2003

Dostoyevsky

"Of course prisons and the system of forced labor do not reform the criminal; they only punish him and secure society against further encroachments on its tranquility. In the criminal, prison and the most intense penal labor serve only to develop hatred, a thirst for forbidden pleasures and a terrible flippancy."


July 30, 2003

Dostoyevsky

"Man is a creature that can get used to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him."


July 30, 2003

David-Neel

"Is there a more cruel torture than to have continually to pass on one's way, powerless to relieve the countless sorrows which lie along the roads of the world!"


July 30, 2003

David-Neel

"In their country, just as in mine or any other one, the policy of the government does not always represent the best side of the nation's mind."


July 25, 2003

Rodham Clinton

"Partisan politicking was nothing new in Washington; it came with the territory. But it was the politics of personal destruction-- visceral, mean-spirited campaigns to ruin the lives of public figures-- that I found disheartening and bad for the country."


June 17, 2003

Dickens

"...they're so fond of Liberty in this part of the globe, that they buy her and sell her and carry her to market with 'em. They've such a passion for Liberty, that they can't help taking liberties with her."


June 2, 2003

Schwartz

"My addiction is to works of the imagination, and even if I became a Buddhist, I think I couldn't renounce them cold turkey. Not after a lifetime, the better part of which was spent reading. Was it actually the better part, though? Did I choose or was I chosen, shepherded like those children caught out early on with a talent for the violin or ballet, baseball or gymnastics, and tethered forever to bows and barres, bats and mats? We didn't know any alternatives; there was no chance to find them out. Reading, of all these, does not win huge sums of money or applause, or give joy and solace to others. What it does offer is a delectable exercise for the mind, and Mr. Cha, the Buddhist scholar, might well find it an indulgence. Like the bodies of dancers or athletes, the minds of readers are genuinely happy and self-possessed only when cavorting around doing their stretches and leaps and jumps to the tune of words."


May 6, 2003

Swofford

"I am entitled to despair over the likelihood of further atrocities. Indolence and cowardice do not drive me-- despair drives me. I remade my war one word at a time, a foolish, desperate act. When I despair, I am alone, and I am often alone. In crowded rooms and walking in the streets of our cities, I am alone and full of despair, and while sitting and writing, I am alone and full of despair-- the same despair that impelled me to write this book, a quiet scream from within a buried coffin. Dead, dead, my scream.
What did I hope to gain? More bombs are coming. Dig your holes with the hands God gave you.
Some wars are unavoidable and need well be fought, but this doesn't erase warfare's waste. Sorry, we must say to the mothers whose sons die horribly. This will never end. Sorry."


April 19, 2003

Swofford

"Already I recognized the incompatibility of religion and the military. The opposite of this assertion seems true when one considers the high number of fiercely religious military people, but they are missing something. They're forgetting the mission of the military to extinguish the lives and livelihoods of other humans.
What do they think all the bombs are for?"


April 18, 2003

Gropnik

"The logic of nationalism always flows downhill, toward the gutter."


March 28, 2003

Rushdie

"Rome did not fall because her armies weakened but because Romans forgot what being a Roman meant. Might this new Rome be more provincial than its provinces; might these new Romans have forgotten what and how to value, or had they never known? Were all empires so undeserving or was this one particularly crass? Was nobody in all this bustling endeavor and material plenitude engaged, any longer, on the deep quarry-work of the mind and heart? O Dream-- America, was civilization's quest to end in obesity and trivia, at Roy Rodgers and Planet Hollywood, in USA Today and on E! or on million-dollar-game-show greed or fly-on-the-wall voyeurism; or in the eternal confession both of Ricki and Oprah and Jerry, whose guests murdered each other after the show; or in the sport of gross-out-dumb-and-dumber comedies designed for young people who sat in darkness howling their ignorance at the silver screen; or even at the unattainable tables of Jean-Georges Vongerichter and Alain Ducasse? What of the search for the hidden keys that unlock the doors of exaltation? Who demolished the City on the Hill and put in its place a row of electric chairs, those dealers in death's democracy, where everyone, the innocent, the mentally deficient, the guilty, could come to die side by side? Who paved paradise and put up a parking lot? Who settled for George W. Gush's boredom and Al Bore's gush? Who let Charlton Heston out of his cage and then asked why children were getting shot?"


March 11, 2003

Rushdie

"The devil, she explained to her attorneys, was short, white, wore a green frock coat, a pigtail and high-heeled slippers, and strongly resembled the philosopher Immanuel Kant."


March 11, 2003

McAllister

"In these modern days, society cannot get along without French chefs."
Ward McAllister
March 10, 2003

Gorgias

"The power of speech has the same effect on the condition of the soul as the application of drugs to the state of bodies; for just as different drugs dispel different fluids from the body, and some bring an end to disease but others end life, so also some speeches cause pain, some pleasure, some fear; some instill courage, some drug and bewitch the soul with a kind of evil persuasion."
Gorgias
"Encomium to Helen"
October 28, 2002

Plutarch

"The gods, O king, have given the Greeks all other gifts in moderate degree; and so our wisdom, too, is a cheerful and a homely, not a noble and kingly wisdom; and this observing the numerous misfortunes that attend all conditions, forbids us to grow insolent upon our present enjoyments, or to admire and man's happiness that may yet, in course of time, suffer change. For the uncertain future has yet to come, with every possible variety of fortune; and him only to whom the divinity has continued happiness unto the end we call happy; to salute as happy one who is still in the midst of life and hazard, we think as little safe and conclusive as to crown and proclaim as victorious the wrestler that is yet in the ring."


October 26, 2002

Plutarch

"For never to be able to control passion shows a weak nature and ill-breeding, and always to moderate it is very hard,m and to some impossible. And laws must look to possibilities, if the maker designs to punish few in order to their amendment, and not many to no purpose."


October 26, 2002

Wells

"Cleanliness might be next to godliness, but honey let me tell you, ugliness will get you nowhere."


September 6, 2002

Wells

"I love a man who can take orders."


September 6, 2002

Wells

"Don't ever admit you know a thing about cooking or it'll be used against you in later life."


September 6, 2002

Tacitus

"This makes one deride the stupidity of people who believe that today's authority can destroy tomorrow's memories."


September 6, 2002

Tacitus

"Important events are obscure. Some believe all manner of hearsay evidence; others twist truth into fiction; and time magnifies both perversions."


September 6, 2002

Polybius

"And yet judgments concerning either the victors or the vanquished which are based on nothing more than the outcome of battles cannot possible be final; for what have appeared to be the most striking successes have often, if they are not rightly used, brought he most overwhelming disasters in their train, and conversely the most terrible calamities have, if bravely endured, actually turned out to the benefit of the sufferers."


July 22, 2002

Plutarch

"...whereas a man has it in his power to be just, if he have but the will to be so, and therefore injustice is thought the most dishonorable, because it is least excusable."


July 22, 2002

Plutarch

"I will begin to speak, when I have that to say which had not better be unsaid."


July 22, 2002

Herodotus

"Verily, 'tis the sorest of all human ills, to abound in knowledge and yet have no power over action."


July 8, 2002

Morris

"How much do you need to know about love to love? The myth of young innocence is a sulky, sly culprit. One loves at that age often more deeply, faithfully, passionately than at any other. Even though it was a secret then from Luke, and perhaps even from me, I loved Georgia more than anyone I had ever known. Perhaps you cannot help who you love, simply cannot help it whenever you do. It is so intense, you try to hold on to that first feeling-- a wonderment, like a twilight. But there will always be the memory of that feeling as long as you live, come back to you like the wistful measures of an echo."


November 4, 2001

Walker

"We are not even the only ones not speaking to each other. Across America elders are not speaking to each other, though most of us will find we have a lot to say, after we've cried in each other's arms. We are a frightened, a brokenhearted nation; some of us wanting desperately to run back to the illusory "safety" of skin color, money or the nineteen fifties. We've never seen weather like the weather there is today. We've never seen violence like the violence we see today. We've never seen greed or evil like the greed and evil we see today. We've never seen tomatoes either, like the ones being created today. There is much from which to recoil.
And yet, strangers who perhaps I am never to know, the past doesn't exist. It cannot be sanctuary. Skin color has always been a tricky solace, more so now that the ozone has changed. After nature is destroyed, money will remain inedible. We have reached a place of deepest emptiness and sorrow. We look at the destruction around us and perceive our collective poverty. We see that everything that is truly needed by the world is too large for individuals to give. We find we have only ourselves. Our experience. Our dreams. Our simple art. Our memories of better ways. Our knowledge that the world cannot be healed in the abstract. The healing begins where the wound was made.
Now it seems to me we might begin to understand something of the meaning of earnest speaking and fearless listening; something of the purpose of the most ancient form of beginning to remake the world: remembering what the world we once made together was like.
I send you my sorrow. And my art.
In the sure knowledge that our people, the American race, lovers who falter and sometimes fail, are good."


May 18, 2001

Walker

"She thought of how precious it was to be able to know another person over many years. There was an incomparable richness in it."


May 18, 2001

Walker

"Maybe the love is there because of shared suffering? Maybe it rises up whenever we perceive that another human has survived. As human."


May 18, 2001

Rubinkowski

"Have you ever wanted to know the truth about something so much you made it up?"
Leslie Rubinowski

"In the woods"
May 9, 2001

Eliot

"Among the blessings of love there is hardly one more exquisite than the sense that in uniting the beloved life to ours we can watch over its happiness, bring comfort where hardship was, and over memories of privation and suffering open the sweetest fountains of joy."


April 16, 2001

Eliot

"For what is love itself, for the one we love best?-- an enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love."


April 16, 2001