She (historian Barbara Tuchman) draws on skepticism, not cynicism, leaving the reader not so much outraged by human ability as amused and saddened by human folly.
If I live near a dancer or a painter, or a clarinet player comes from my neighborhood, I take some pleasure in that, feel a little more as if I come from someplace in particular.
It seems to me that in our lifetime we have passed from the wreck of liberal humanism to the beginning of a new recognition of dogma: isn't it rather tremendous?
There were air raids at night. The factory was dark and dirty. And I remember thinking - well - I must find somebody or something because like this I cannot go on.
The belief is growing on me that the disease is communicated by the bite of the mosquito... She always injects a small quantity of fluid with her bite - what if the parasites get into the system in this manner.
Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.
History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.
Climate change. Urbanization. Biotechnology. Those three narratives, still taking shape, are developing a long arc likely to dominate this century.
"Snow was falling, so much like stars filling the dark trees that one could easily imagine its reason for being was nothing more than prettiness.
the loss is transformative, in good ways and bad, a tangle of change that cannot be threaded into the usual narrative spools...It's not an emergence from the cocoon, but a tree growing around an obstruction.
Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled— to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.
No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.
Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
But,instead of what our imagination makes us suppose and which we worthless try to discover,life gives us something that we could hardly imagine.
La vera terra dei barbari non è quella che non ha mai conosciuto l’arte, ma quella che, disseminata di capolavori, non sa né apprezzarli né conservarli.
I've never felt powerful enough to write a true political novel, or deeply knowledgeable enough to draw a character like, say, Tolstoy's Prince Kutuzov.
I want my careless song to strike no minor key; no fiend to stand between my body's Southern song - the fusion of the South, my body's song and me.
With big folks, either people think you look mean or it's more of a jolly Santa Claus, 'Oh, he's just a pudgy little teddy bear pillow.'
I think one of the nicest things that we created as a generation was just the fact that we could say, 'Hey, I don't like white people.'
I love you because no two snowflakes are alike, and it is possible, if you stand tippy-toe, to walk between the raindrops.
I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.
