A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two.
Some men give up their designs when they have almost reached the goal, while others, on the contrary, obtain a victory by exerting, at the last moment, more vigorous efforts than ever before
She herself did not seem quite real. She was pale and almost transparent, the victim I used for my own enjoyment in dreams.
But what are facts, really, except things we’ve already proven? There could be lots of almost-facts out there, still waiting for proof.
Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them. This only looks like love.
In the old pieces of furniture almost as in the old paintings, dwells the charm of the past, of the faded which becomes stronger in a man when he reaches an advanced age.
Then, breathing slow, and almost deliberately, stops. But for a moment the old man doesn’t realize he is dead. He can feel Martin’s heart and mistakes it for his own.
Something coming back from the dead was almost always bad news. Movies taught me that. For every one Jesus you get a million zombies.
Writers of fiction embellish reality almost without knowing it.
He understood well enough how a man with a choice between pride and responsibility will almost always choose pride--if responsibility robs him of his manhood.
Could you possibly be a little more incoherent?" asked Olivenko. "There are bits of this I'm almost understanding, and I'm sure that's not what you have in mind.
She almost never said his name. Because it made the dreams too real. Because it made the loneliness too tangible when she woke up.
It had ever, as I told the reader, been one of the singular blessings of my life, to be almost every hour of it miserably in love with some one....
The challenge is trying to set people free, and help them be 'successful' in the world, which are almost always opposite objectives.
Almost everything you think is sacred, good and decent, is a lie and an all-out assault against truth and decency.
One of the chief paradoxes of our culture [is] that the welfare of its children, its _future_, is placed almost exclusively in the hands of people of low status, a class it holds in contempt.
But if you were matched," I say softly, "What do you think she'd be like?" "You," he says, almost before I've finished. "You,
An imperfect human heart, perfectly shattered, was her conclusion. A condition so common as to be virtually universal, rendering issues of right and wrong almost incidental.
Oh, well, that's not bad, I suppose. I mean, I'd prefer devastatingly sophisticated - but almost endearing is more than I could have hoped for under the circumstances.
A cultivated and decent man cannot be vain without setting a fearfully high standard for himself, and without despising and almost hating himself at certain moments.
But the culture has failed, almost entirely, in inculcating internal controls on actions that have their origin in authority. For this reason, the latter constitutes a far greater danger to human survival.
