In most cases, one can learn at least as much about the writer and the culture of his era from such descriptions as one can about the animals. Literature about animals is relatively less self-conscious, and, for that reason, more revealing than writi...
Certainly, if money could have been raised upon the book, Robert Herrick would long ago have sacrificed that last possession: but the demand for literature, which is so marked a feature in some parts of the South Seas, extends not so far as the dead ...
People are always saying these things about how there's no need to read literature anymore-that it won't help the world. Everyone should apparently learn to speak Mandarin, and learn how to write code for computers. More young people should go into S...
Most people in this country are looking for literature that is useful. They feel that just exploring their feelings is good enough - they should be reading about leveraged buy-outs or how to get thin. We live in a culture that is so absolutely, madly...
I have argued elsewhere (Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence [2005]) that we need to treat ethics in biblical texts just as we treat ethics in any other works of ancient literature. It is a vacuous exercise to pick and choose which atro...
While some accused and convicted child molesters have inappropriately influenced the media, the public, and many in the clinical and legal professions by claiming that traumatic amnesia does not occur in child sexual abuse, workers in the field of tr...
Rose Mather: People ask all the time what I learned in the camps. But the camps weren't therapy. What do you think these places were? Universities? We didn't go there to learn. One becomes very clear about these things. What are you asking for? Forgi...
[None of his literature students are paying attention] Jennings: Don't write this down, but I find Milton probably as boring as you find Milton. Mrs. Milton found him boring too. He's a little bit long-winded, he doesn't translate very well into our ...
The worst feature of the Common Core is its anti-humanistic, utilitarian approach to education. It mistakes what a child is and what a human being is for. That is why it has no use for poetry, and why it boils the study of literature down to the scra...
For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the nor...
Fred C. Dobbs: Say, mister. Will you stake a fellow American to a meal? American in Tampico in white suit: Such impudence never came my way. Early this afternoon I gave you money... while I was having my shoes polished I gave you MORE money... now yo...
The American attitude towards efficiency and execution should always underlie architecture.
L.A. is my American city.
British girls are as temperamental as Americans.
Americans are so dedicated to their jobs.
Americans don't like European movies.
Americans are shy about the body.
If we think the main mission of the church is to improve life in Adam and add a little moral strength to this fading evil age, we have not yet understood the radical condition for which Christ is such a radical solution.
Regardless of the official theology held on paper, moralistic preaching (the bane of conservatives and liberals alike) assumes that we are not really helpless sinners who need to be rescued but decent folks who need good examples, exhortations, and i...
Annual state spending alone for prison facilities is now estimated at about $52 to $62 billion, the bulk of which is spent building new facilities; operating and maintaining more prisons; providing food and health care for prisoners; and administrati...
Right now, the economy is a whole lot like a fairly good-looking brain-dead chick in a persistent vegetative coma. You can't really wake her up, but there's things she's still good for.
