A man's death makes everything certain about him. Of course, secrets may die with him. And of course, a hundred years later somebody looking through some papers may discover a fact which throws a totally different light on his life and of which all t...
Crown Prince Leopold: You're late. Chief Inspector Uhl: My apologies, your Highness. I was attending to loose ends of the case. Crown Prince Leopold: Are there still loose ends? Chief Inspector Uhl: Very few. Crown Prince Leopold: Did he do it again?...
The daughter of the literary biographer Leslie Stephen, and close friend of the innovative biographer of the Victorians, Lytton Strachey, Woolf herself put forward, in ‘The New Biography’ (1927) (reviewing work by another biographer acquaintance,...
An old walrus-faced waiter attended to me; he had the knack of pouring the coffee and the hot milk from two jugs, held high in the air, and I found this entrancing, as if he were a child's magician. One day he said to me - he had some English - "Why ...
Consistently, [Yves] Congar emphasized the distinction between Tradition and traditionalism. The latter was an unyielding commitment to the past. The former was a living principle of commitment to the Beginning, a process that required creativity, in...
And how is your head? Better?" he asked. "Very much. Sometimes it hurts." Right now it was throbbing. "But every day I am much improved." "Where did you hit it? Are you bruised?" I put a hand to the back of my head, a little to the left, where I had ...
For what prevents us from saying that the happy life is to have a mind that is free, lofty, fearless and steadfast - a mind that is placed beyond the reach of fear, beyond the reach of desire, that counts virtue the only good, baseness the only evil,...
In the two years after No Logo came out, I went to dozens of teach-ins and conferences, some of them attended by thousands of people (tens of thousands in the case of the World Social Forum), that were exclusively devoted to popular education about t...
If I had known how much I would miss these sensations I might have experienced them differently, recognized their shabby glamour, respected the ticking clock that defined this entire experience. I would have put aside my resentment, dropped my defens...
According to old frineds who grew up with Stanley Ann Dunham, she became a serious student of Communist and Marxist theories back in high school. One profile even named a few of her radical teachers and administrators at Mercer High, which Dunham att...
...I should always find, the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that middle station had the fewest disasters, and was not exposed to so many vicissitudes as the higher or lower part of mankind; nay, they wer...
A man's life is his whole life, not the last glimmering snuff of the candle; and this, I say, is considerable, and not a little matter, whether we regard its pleasures or its pains. To draw a peevish conclusion to the contrary from our own superannua...
Service members will only stay on active duty if they can provide for their families—and DOD schools provide a world-class education that has proven time and again to be an incentive for sailors, soldiers, airmen and marines to reenlist. Military d...
Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid ...
I received comments on how extraordinary it was that I could keep up speaking for exactly 45 minutes. Indeed, in an age of soundbites lasting some seconds and of quick quotes in the news, all those minutes do seem like an eternity, easy to get lost i...
Christine Collins: He's not my son! Capt. J.J. Jones: Why are you doing this, Mrs. Collins? Why are you doing this? You seem perfectly capable of taking care of the boy. Your job pays you enough to attend to his personal needs, so I don't understand ...
[after all the other Senators walk out] Jefferson Smith: Oh, Mr. President, we seem to be alone. I, I'm not complaining for a social reason; it's just, I think it'd be a pity if these gentlemen missed any of this, and... [Clarissa starts waving from ...
Narrator: The day before he died was Palm Sunday. And Mr. and Mrs. Howard, their two children and their cousin Charles Johnson strolled to the second Presbyterian Church to attend the 10:00 service. Bob remained at the cottage and slyly migrated from...
Genie: [as a female flight attendant] Thank you for choosing Magic Carpet for all your travel needs. Don't stand until the rug has come to a complete stop. Thank you. Goodbye now. Goodbye. Goodbye. Thank you. Goodbye. Genie: [back to normal] Well, ho...
There's a psychological mechanism, I've come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant ...
Me: “I refuse to attend Support Group.” Mom: “One of the symptoms of depression is disinterest in activities.” Me: “Please just let me watch America’s Next Top Model. It’s an activity.” Mom: “Television is a passivity.” Me: “Ugh...
