[Longer introduction to "The Nutcracker Suite"] Narrator: You know, it's funny how wrong an artist can be about his own work. The one composition of Tchaikovsky's that he really detested was his "Nutcracker Suite", which is probably the most popular ...
Narrator: [introducing Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor] What you will see are the different things that might pass through your mind if you sat in a concert hall listening to this music. At first, you are more or less conscious of the orchestra. ...
Georg Dreyman: You are a great artist. I know that, and your audience knows it, too. You don't need him. You don't need him. Stay here. Don't go to him. Christa-Maria Sieland: No? I don't need him? Don't I need this whole system? What about you? Then...
Woody: [after dealing with Prospector] I think it's time that Prospector learned something called playtime. [points to something off screen] Woody: Right over there guys! Stinky Pete the Prospector: No, no, No! [we see a Barbie backpack come out of t...
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...
I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the comman...
To maximize what you get out of your college experience, I want your friends to look at your semester schedule and say “this is the weirdest schedule I’ve ever seen!” Trust me on this one. If you want to be an engineer, take Engineering 101, an...
New York always feels more like my hometown than the places where I actually grew up (which weren't far from New York), perhaps because I did my artistic "growing up" while working in this crazy, wonderful city back in my twenties. Although I love th...
Zoltán looked at them through the window. He hated the man. Now he hated work. Work for these? Work with these? He saw before him the great puszta. Here the long, cracked stripe of a ditch once again stole the blue of the sky, transforming it into a...
He had been taught as a child that Urras was a festering mass of inequity, iniquity, and waste. But all the people he met, and all the people he saw, in the smallest country village, were well dressed, well fed, and contrary to his expectations, indu...
Perhaps your hunger to belong is always active and intense because you belonged so totally before you came here. This hunger to belong is the echo and reverberation of your invisible heritage. You are from somewhere else, where you were known, embrac...
Freedom, or individual liberty, was a basic premise of the Spanish anarchist tradition. "Individual sovereignty" is a prime tenet of most anarchist writing; the free development of one' s individual potential is one of the basic "rights" to which all...
I hate wise men because they are lazy, cowardly, and prudent. To the philosophers' equanimity, which makes them indifferent to both pleasure and pain, I prefer devouring passions. The sage knows neither the tragedy of passion, nor the fear of death, ...
Was [Steve Jobs] smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. [...] Like a pathfinder, he could absorb information, sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead. Steve ...
Only by remembering to say 'no' will the women of 21st century regain their voice and remember their power. 'No' is the most important word in a woman's dialectic arsenal, and it is the one word that our employers, our leaders, and quite often, the m...
Christian hope frees us to act hopefully in the world. It enables us to act humbly and patiently, tackling visible injustices in the world around us without needing to be assured that our skill and our effort will somehow rid the world of injustice a...
Zombies are familiar characters in philosophical thought experiments. They are like people in every way except they have no internal experience.... If there are enough zombies recruited into our world, I worry about the potential for a self-fulfillin...
Only a woman can carry in her body an eternal being which bears the very image of God. Only she is the recipient of the miracle of life. Only a woman can conceive and nurture this life using her own flesh and blood, and then deliver a living soul int...
Here is the essence of mankind's creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it, but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatoza attacking an ovum. It might be argued that the Siamese-twin inf...
Like Goethe's offers a wide panorama of scenes from the vulgar to the sublime, with passages of wondrous poetry that can be sensed even through the veil of translation. And it also preserves the iridescence of its modern theme. From it Oswald Spengle...
She was not suicidal; that is what people never managed to grasp. Cutting relieved the pressure and stood as some enduring demonstration of her emotion, some way to be in control of a body that could toss her about with seizures. It was borderline ar...
