Eli Willard just looked at her for a long moment, and then he announced, ' strikes iceberg in mid-Atlantic; 215 drown. New York City fire destroys 700 buildings. Japanese earthquake kills 12,000. Worldwide cholera epidemic kills millions. Wages rise,...
When Thoreau considered "where I live and what I live for," he tied together location and values. Where we live doesn't just change how we live; it informs who we become. Most recently, technology promises us lives on the screen. What values, Thoreau...
It did not occur to me that absence of human companionship does not assure solitude. It may, on the contrary, plunge one into an environment compared with which New York or London would appear deserts. For we take memory and imagination with us. The ...
The ethical aspect of the Law of Thelema is simple enough theoretically. "Do what thou wilt" does not mean "do what you please"; though this degree of emancipation is implied, that we can no longer say that any given course of action is "wrong". Ever...
You know, it's pretty easy reading this book to see why I was angry and confused for all those years. I lived my life being told different stories: some true, some lies and I still don't know which is which. Children are born innocent. At birth we ar...
People accuse me of having interiorized a feeling of racial inferiority, so that I attack my own culture out of self-hatred, because I want to be white. This is a tiresome argument. Tell me, is freedom then only for white people? Is it self-love to a...
Because it is the nature of love to create, a marriage itself is something which has to be created, so that, together we become a new creature. To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take…If we commit ourselves to one per...
You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don't say a great deal. So much the better, there is no message that indiscreetly outshouts the message that the book itself must communicate...
I was beginning to understand something I couldn't articulate. It was a jazzy feeling in my chest, a fluttering, a kind of buzzing in my brain. Warmth. Life. The circulation of blood. Sanguinity. I don't know. I understood the enormous risk of tellin...
People say that America has no religion, but it's the opposite: America has every religion, all the old ones, and produces more new ones than anywhere else on earth. America;'s religious life is like the photo mosaic in which a thousand little images...
All Renaissance drama, especially the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare, is profoundly concerned with shifting power relations within society. The individual was a new force in relation to the state. The threat of rebellion, of the overturning of esta...
Don't worry, I can't be bothered! You're not worth the trouble it would take to hit you! You're not worth the powder it would take to blow you up. You are an empty, empty, hollow shell of a woman. I mean, what the hell are you doing in my house if yo...
It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thinking which produced many of civilization's most imp...
Jelly beans! Millions and billions of purples and yellows and greens and licorice and grape and raspberry and mint and round and smooth and crunchy outside and soft-mealy inside and sugary and bouncing jouncing tumbling clittering clattering skitteri...
In the twenty-first century, the visions of J.C. Nichols and Walt Disney have come full circle and joined. “Neighborhoods” are increasingly “developments,” corporate theme parks. But corporations aren’t interested in the messy ebb and flow ...
Nimrod began to understand that what he was experiencing was, in spite of its appearance of novelty, something which had existed before–many times before. His body began to recognize situations, impressions, and objects. In reality, none of there a...
Life's a freaking mess. In fact, I'm going to tell Sarah we need to start a new philosophical movement: messessentialism instead of existentialism: For those who revel in the essential mess that is life. Because Gram's right, there's not one truth ev...
In our family "whim-wham" is code, a defanged reference to any number of moods and psychological disorders, be they depressive, manic, or schizoaffective. Back in the 1970s and '80s - when they were all straight depression - we called them "dark nigh...
I wanted to start over completely, to begin again as new people with nothing of the past left over. I wanted to run away from who we had been seen to be, who we had been... It's the first thing I think of when trouble comes - the geographic solution....
Others, I am not the first, Have willed more mischief than they durst: If in the breathless night I too Shiver now, 'tis nothing new. More than I, if truth were told, Have stood and sweated hot and cold, And through their veins in ice and fire Fear c...
Then I started to think in Lipp’s about when I had first been able to write a story about losing everything. It was up in Cortina d’Ampezzo when I had come back to join Hadley there after the spring skiing which I had to interrupt to go on assign...
