Man is a glorious and unique species of animal. The species originated by evolution.... Future evolution could raise man to superb heights as yet hardly glimpsed, but it will not automatically do so. As far as can now be foreseen, evolutionary degene...
For more than half a century I have tried to confront greatness directly, hardly a fashionable stance, but I see no other justification for literary criticism in the shadows of our Evening Land. Over time the strong poets settle these matters for the...
Perhaps when I first arrived on this world so long ago I may have known more. Now, though, I do not have knowledge of as much as I used to. The years, many of them, have changed this world and the great societies flourish with change. Although I feel...
The theme of invisibility has haunted me for many years, since earliest girlhood. A woman often feels ‘invisible’ in a public sense precisely because her physical being - her ‘visibility’ - figures so prominently in her identity. She is judge...
Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, and their resp...
I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The...
Harold's Bow and Food Bowl bowl bowl bowl Food food food food The miracle of the heavenly restaurant I mouth this great dark sad evening Suddenly they come for me in a limousine How could I have believed I was vanquished I never lay slain I am the vi...
Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the only thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, ...
...Americans didn’t stick to cities, which makes us different from the people in other industrialized countries. We no sooner arrived in town, turning those towns into great mid-century metropolises, than we decided to take off for the green world ...
Christopher McCandless: Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause "the West is the best." ...
Jacob Singer: What's it say? Jezebel: [Reading the thermometer] Oh my God! I'm calling the Doctor! Jacob Singer: What's it say? Jezebel: It's gone to the top! Jacob Singer: Great! Jezebel: [On the phone] Hello Dr. Forest! I'm so sorry to bother you! ...
Mayor Grundy: Next, a newcomer to the Pie Eat, but one we expect great things from in the future. Young master David Hogan! Bill Travis: [Trips Lardass, who falls and hits his large belly on the stage] Are you all right, young man? Lardass Heckler #1...
Dean: I feel like men are more romantic than women. When we get married, we marry, like, one girl, 'cause we're resistant the whole way until we meet one girl and we think, "I'd be an idiot if I didn't marry this girl. She's so great". But it seems l...
[about to have sex in a car behind his restaurant] Nicky Santoro: I fly stuff in fresh every day. I get bread from back home, I get fish from California, and you can always tell a great kitchen like ours 'cause of the milk-fed veal. That's the secret...
Bane: We take Gotham from the corrupt! The rich! The oppressors of generations who have kept you down with myths of opportunity, and we give it back to you... the people. Gotham is yours. None shall interfere. Do as you please. Start by storming Blac...
Annie Kinsella: Terence Mann was a voice of reason during a time of great madness. Where others were chanting, "Burn, baby, burn", he was talking about love and peace and prosperity. He coined the phrase, "Make love, not war". I cherished every one o...
[first Lines] Narrator: In the final decade of the 21st Century, men and women in rocket ships landed on the moon. By 2200 AD, they had reached the other planets of our solar system. Almost at once there followed the discovery of hyperdrive through w...
Chuckie: Every day I come by your house and I pick you up. And we go out. We have a few drinks, and a few laughs, and it's great. But you know what the best part of my day is? For about ten seconds, from when I pull up to the curb and when I get to y...
Colonel Robert G. Shaw: Dear Mother, They learn, learn quickly, faster than white troops it seems to me. They are almost grave and sedate under instruction and they restrain themselves. But the moment they are dismissed from drill every tongue is rel...
[last lines] Rob: The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don't wanna blow your...
[last lines] Dave Lizewski: [voiceover] Kick-Ass was gone but not forgotten. And my world was a lot safer with the new generation of superheroes. They said I was their inspiration. But all I did was open a door to a world I'd dreamed about since I wa...