The next night, alone in the tent, Laurent said: 'As we draw closer to the border, I think it would be safer--more private--to hold our discussions in your language rather than mine.' He said it in carefully pronounced Akielon. Damen stared at him, f...
The great gain was that I very soon became able to understand a great deal without (even mentally) translating it; I was beginning to think in Greek. That is the great Rubicon to cross in learning any language. Those in whom only the Greek word lives...
It is immensely gratifying to hear from fans from around the world where being a gay or lesbian teen, having feelings for someone of your own gender is simply not acceptable. We noticed that our show fills a huge void for large audiences in many diff...
Lies I've told my 3 year old recently Trees talk to each other at night. All fish are named either Lorna or Jack. Before your eyeballs fall out from watching too much TV, they get very loose. Tiny bears live in drain pipes. If you are very very quiet...
If I were asked to name the deadliest subversive force within capitalism--the single greatest source of its waning morality--I should without hesitation name advertising. How else should one identify a force that debases language, drains thought, and...
Modern Christianity, in dramatic reversal of its biblical form, promises to relieve the pain of living in a fallen world. Then message, whether it’s from fundamentalists requiring us to live by a favored set of rules or from charismatics urging a d...
Pity the nation whose people are sheep, and whose shepherds mislead them. Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced, and whose bigots haunt the airwaves. Pity the nation that raises not its voice, except to praise conquerors a...
But now, our daily monkeyshines are such, our preoccupations are so low, our language has be come so debased, the words so blunted and damaged, we've said such stupid and dull things, the the higher beings hear only babbling and grunting and TV comme...
I remember when your name was just another name that rolled without thought off my tongue. Now, I can’t look at your name without an abundance of sentiment attached to each lettter. Your name, which I played with so carelessly, so easily, has someh...
Isaac Deutscher was best known—like his compatriot Joseph Conrad—for learning English at a late age and becoming a prose master in it. But, when he writes above, about the ‘fact’ that millions of people ‘may’ conclude something, he commit...
Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race; for it is remarkable that no transcript of them has ever been made into any mode...
I love you... I love you without needing you, I love you without wanting you. I love you for being you. Because, you see, needing you is a necessity; and wanting you is a desire. But being, is as it is. And so, you as you are, this as it is, is as it...
I started studying law, but this I could stand just for one semester. I couldn't stand more. Then I studied languages and literature for two years. After two years I passed an examination with the result I have a teaching certificate for Latin and Hu...
I really love folklore. I had read a lot of faerie folklore that informed the books I wrote. I also really love vampire folklore; my eighth grade research paper was on [it]. [With this project,] it was really helpful to think about the way you can us...
Too often, contemporary continental philosophers take the “other” of philosophy to mean literature, but not religion, which is for them just a little too wholly other, a little beyond their much heralded tolerance of alterity. They retain an anta...
Oskar Schindler: I've been speaking to Goeth. Itzhak Stern: I know the destination. These are the evacuation orders, I'm to help arrange the shipments, put myself on the last train. Oskar Schindler: That's not what I was going to say. I made Goeth pr...
Ariel: But without my voice, how can I. Ursula: You'll have your looks. Your pretty face and don't underestimate the importance of "body language." Ha! [singing] Ursula: The men up there don't like a lot of blabber / They think a girl who gossips is ...
Maximillian Cohen: Restate my assumptions: One, Mathematics is the language of nature. Two, Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. Three: If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge. Therefore, there are p...
[while interrogating the boys, Smecker is surprised that they are fluent in Russian] Paul Smecker: You speak any other languages? Murphy: Aye. Our mother insisted on it. Paul Smecker: French? Murphy: [in French] How do you think he figured all this o...
In my opinion it is not the writer's job to solve such problems as God, pessimism, etc; his job is merely to record who, under what conditions, said or thought what about God or pessimism. The artist is not meant to be a judge of his characters and w...
In the language of the day it is customary to describe a certain sort of book as “escapist” literature. As I understand it, the adjective implies, a little condescendingly, that the life therein depicted cannot be identified with the real life wh...
