Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine.
Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination.
Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block.
According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.
I never met a man who was shaken by a field of identical blades of grass. An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one's mind.
The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.
A commitment to sexual equality with men is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.
For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?
I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I'm a genre writer.
Mysteries, like the Masonic rites, are ones parents and elders are sworn not to reveal to the uninitiated, which include all children. And so we sought for signs.
The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.
I want to write poems which are very emotional, but I would have some hesitation in saying I want to write poems which are sentimental.
If people connect me with the Romantics in general, they probably connect me most with Keats. But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.
To love love and not its meaning, hardens the heart in monstrous ways..." (The Rape Of The Swan) Footnote : A form of self-edification, infatuation, lust and the epitome of hedonism.
What is more important to a library than anything else -- than everything else -- is the fact that it exists." [ , American Scholar; Washington, DC, June 5, 1972]
If it's painful for you to criticize your friends, you're safe in doing it; if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that's the time to hold your tongue.
You're dancing on me said the cosmic dragon, the galactic surface of all we can see. So fucking what? she said.
Wind ought to be a verb or an adverb. It isn't really anything. It's a manner of movement of warmth and cold: a kind of information system of the air.
I try not to invent; I try simply to translate the weird language of the natural world. And I'm not into absolute ownership of things.
We make our discoveries through our mistakes: we watch one another's success: and where there is freedom to experiment there is hope to improve.
