What the war did was give me the opportunity of three years of continuous reading, and it was in the course of reading that I became convinced that I should become an economist.
So with the end of the Cold War, it became increasingly obvious that there was no basis upon which any decision was being made, not in the White House, and certainly because of that, not in the Congress.
But it then very soon became clear that the response of a war against terrorism, initially conceived of in a metaphorical sense, began to be taken increasingly seriously and came to entail waging a real war.
I had had a feeling of freedom because of the sudden change in my life. By comparison to what had come before, I felt immensely free. But then, once I became used to that freedom, even small tasks became more difficult. I placed constraints on myself...
Many governments employ torture but this was the first time that the element of Saturnalia and pornography in the process had been made so clear to me. If you care to imagine what any inadequate or cruel man might do, given unlimited power over a wom...
Language is a social energy, and our capacity for articulate speech is the key factor that makes us different from other species. We are not as fast as cheetahs – or even as horses. Nor are we as strong as bulls or as adaptable as bacteria. But our...
The quintessential emblem of religion and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core is the sacrifice of a child by a parent. Almost all religious faiths incorporate the myth of such a sacrifice, and some have actually m...
The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us...During the past decade, women breached the power structure; meanwhile, eating disorders r...
I became aware of Jews in my early teens, as I started to pick up the signals from the Christian church. Not that I was Christian – I’d been an atheist since I was five. But my father, a Congregational minister, had some sympathy with the idea th...
Kazuko Yoshiyama: I first fell in love in high school. We became really close as soon as we met. It was like we'd known each other since childhood. But it was over before we became adults. Makoto Konno: Why? Kazuko Yoshiyama: The timing was probably ...
At night I would return home, set out a lamp before me, and devote myself to reading and writing. Whenever sleep overcame me or I became conscious of weakening, I would turn aside to drink a cup of wine, so that my strength would return to me. Then I...
Emerald slopes became so tall they touched the clouds, and showers painted diamond waterfalls that sluiced down cliff sides.
Sometimes, if she simply remained quiet, and let the inadequacy of his excuses reverberate on the air, he became ashamed and backtracked.
People started down the road with good intentions, but the moment the road became rough or difficult, they'd abandon it.
Father is a school ... He always wanted to write books. But he became rich instead, so is not allowed.
His idleness was his refuge, and in this he was like many others in [occupied] France in that period; laziness became political.
This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.
At a certain age men began to shrink, and yet it was precisely at that age that their trousers became too short for them.
Running, the music flew into him, became the wind that pushed back his hair and the slap of his own feet on the pavement.
When I was a child, I thought like a child. When I became adult, I seek a deeper understanding of life.
I trained as a writer before I became a lawyer. I was headed for a life as an English professor, but that just wasn't me. I'm not a scholar; I didn't have a scholar's attitude toward literature.
