guileless and without vanity,we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.
That’s different. The French know that the English are superior to them and they’re appropriate about it. The Eastern Europeans on the other hand have no sense of place. All that communism has them thinking that everyone really is of the same cla...
Mostly what you lose with time, in memory, is the specificity of things, their exact sequence. It all runs together, becomes a watery soup. Portmanteau days, imploded years. Like a bad actor, memory always goes for effect, abjuring motivation, consis...
O son of Kunti, the nonpermanent appearance of happiness and distress, and their disappearance in due course, are like the appearance and disappearance of winter and summer seasons. They arise from sense perception, O scion of Bharata, and one must l...
Anna… envied Joan’s deep connection with the human race. She was a member of the club. Anna was half convinced she’d been begotten by a passing alien life-form on a human woman. It was as good an explanation as any for the sense she had of bein...
When bad strikes, most likely you will not get an answer when you ask, “Why?” Your strength must come from having faith that someday the answer will come and then it will all make sense.
As much as I hated to admit it, I kind of looked forward to seeing him. It made no sense, but something about his infuriating nature made me forget about my other worries. Weirdly, I felt like I could relax around him.
It was difficult to hold Broca's brain without wondering whether in some sense Broca was still there—his wit, his skeptical mien, his abrupt gesticulations when he talked, his quiet and sentimental moments.
She always used to say that the past is a relentless parasite in its quest, feeding off of the senses, looking for anything that will trigger a memory–forever there to complicate the present, forever there to remind us that it will always be a piec...
She pulled away. "That doesn't make any sense." "Neither does this," he said, "but I don't care. I'm sick of trying to pretend I can live without you. Don't you understand that? Can't you see it's killing me?
No one ever sits you down at age eight and says, 'Aminatta, this is what's happened so far.' You have to work it out for yourself, and by the time you do, it's ancient history to many of the players. We're trying to make sense of the past, so we star...
Most people today don't feel that Barack Obama is on our side. We sense he's incapable of doing what Roosevelt did, of loving his country so much that he was willing to run great risks in order to advance its cause, to free others from a new Dark Age...
I think my swing's a pretty long swing, so that helps in the sense that it doesn't get too short because of age. As many of the people, many of the golfers do when they get older, their swing gets a little shorter and quicker. I've been able to still...
Once you've finished typing and moving text around and everything else, you have to leave it alone for a while. You do that to see if it stands up, to see if all the loose edges have been trimmed, if it makes sense, if it's consistent, what shape it ...
We know there are certain chemicals that are designed to give us a rush of pleasure. But, one of the most amazing things about being human is our capacity to override that pleasure. To either say, 'I don't need that pleasure right now. I'm going to i...
I went on a book tour immediately after 9/11. I was due to leave the following Wednesday, so I just did. It was an amazing thing, because planes hadn't been flying very many days, and I got on this plane and went to San Francisco, and the minute that...
I've gotten to work with amazing people. I would say usually we get to a point before we get into the studio where there isn't that sense of anxiety or nervousness of who they are because I don't think it would be as productive in the studio if that ...
As a kid who wasn't into sports, at school I felt almost alienated at times, whereas in the theatre community there was this amazing sense of camaraderie. Early on, we would go to rehearsals with my dad and I was like the mascot for the backstage cre...
I don't think architecture should be considered as an art form in the first instance. Whenever I say that, it makes people really angry. But this is a very political profession in the Grecian sense. I believe there have to be reasons for every buildi...
I'd been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it's environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this 'ambient music.' But at the same time I was trying to make ...
Imagine if all those kings and dukes hadn't commissioned those crazy cathedrals, paintings and music... we'd still be living in sticks and mud. Because none of those things made any economic sense. Human beings' capacity to 'waste time' is a miracle ...
