(The paradox of Italian soccer). As everyone knows, Italian men are the most foppish representatives of their sex on the planet. They smear on substantial quantities of hair care products and expend considerable mental energies color-coordinating soc...
To remember love after long sleep; to turn again to poetry after a year in the market place, or to youth after resignation to drowsy and stiffening age; to remember what once you thought life could hold, after telling over with muddied and calculatin...
The greatest gift of life on the mountain is time. Time to think or not think, read or not read, scribble or not scribble -- to sleep and cook and walk in the woods, to sit and stare at the shapes of the hills. I produce nothing but words; I consumer...
You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side. You need to trust yourself, especially on a first draft, where amid the anxiety and self-doubt, there should be a real sense of your imagination an...
He was lost. He knew it. He had neither the size nor the strength to defeat her, and she had him cornered. But he would fight. He was a warrior, the prince-son of the unicorns, and he meant to go down fighting. There would be no songs to mark his dea...
Tak ada orang progresif yang berpikiran sehat akan menentang cita-cita komunis, yang mencakup bantuan di bidang sosial dan ekonomi. Kami menyetujui ini semua. Tetapi aku tidak mungkin meninggalkan Tuhan. Aku tidak mungkin membuang nasionalisme dan ak...
Pasti ada korban pada setiap peperangan. Tugas seorang panglima adalah memenangkan peperangan, bahkan jika itu terpaksa mengalami kekalahan dalam beberapa pertempuran di dalam perjalanan. Bila aku terpaksa mengorbankan ribuan jiwa demi menyelamatkan ...
Aku telah melakukan kesalahan dalam hidupku. Di masa silam aku telah mengakuinya dan pengakuan itu menimbulkan kekuatan. Tetapi keberanian dari seseorang terletak pada keyakinannya bahwa dia telah bertindak benar. Aku tidak akan hidup, jika tidak yak...
Kaum imperialis, perhatikan! Apabila dalam waktu yang tidak lama lagi Perang Pasifik menggeledek dan menyambar-nyambar membelah angkasa, apabila dalam waktu yang tidak lama lagi Samudera Pasifik menjadi merah oleh darah dan bumi disekitarnya bergetar...
Aku tidak begitu memikirkan benda-benda duniawi seperti uang. Hanya orang yang tak pernah menghirup apinya nasionalisme dapat larut dalam hal-hal sepele seperti itu. Kemerdekaan adalah makanan yang membuat aku hidup. Ideologi, idealisme. Makanan dari...
When Peter renounced the world he grew up in and the people he grew up with, I believe it was exactly as heroic as that of a person who, finding himself prone to violent seasickness, renounces yachting. Hell, Pete was hardly ‘in the world’ in the...
The point is , if i'd known all this years earlier, maybe I would have put some thought into how I actually wanted to dress, look and behave because I would have understood that I didn't need to be constrained to playing the part of the platonic, mis...
The French believe that kids feel confident when they're able to do things for themselves, and do those things well. After children have learned to talk, adults don't praise them for saying just anything. They praise them for saying interesting thing...
I plastered on my best poker face, attempting to appear cool and casual even thought I had never been so eager to deliver two Chicken Parmagianas in my life. "Just be careful, hon," Rosanna said. "Oh, are the plates hot?" I flinched back just before ...
One of his private vanities was that all the garbage sorting had endowed his hands with killing strength—that he could chop a brick in half like Bruce Lee. “So let’s get a brick,” replied a girl with whom he had once, injudiciously, shared th...
In places where government priorities and market imperatives create a world so capricious that to help a neighbor is to risk your ability to feed your family, and sometimes even your own liberty, the idea of the mutually supportive poor community is ...
Food wasn’t one of the amenities at Cooper, the five-hundred-bed hospital on which millions of poor people depended. Nor was medicine. “Out of stock today” was the nurses’ official explanation. Plundered and resold out of supply cabinets was ...
The municipality sent water through six Annawadi faucets for ninety minutes in the morning and ninety minutes at night. Shiv Sena men had appropriated the taps, charging usage fees to their neighbors. These water-brokers were resented, but not as muc...
In families one can’t choose one’s siblings. Within regions one doesn’t choose one’s neighbors. And if you are one of the world’s leading producers of a critical industrial resource like copper, in the end you can’t really choose your cus...
As the episode of Scandal ended, I sat up in my bed and thought, I have to read it again. It was driving me crazy, so I got out of bed and skipped down stairs of my comfy loft on the east side of Paradise Hills. Once downstairs I slipped the letter o...
The academic and writer Sara Ahmed has written brilliantly about the idea of the feminist killjoy, and why it should be embraced – because feminism isn’t about making everyone around the table feel comfortable. It’s about being disruptive, chal...
