The costumes help. They make it less real, disguise what it really is both for the actors and for the people who'll see it on the screen. It's like the people who read and because it's in Russia they can say, 'Oh, that's not my pain they're talking a...
The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit i...
She led him to the top of the stairs, where light came straight from the sky because the second-story windows of that house had been placed in the pitched ceiling and not the walls. There were two rooms and she took him into one of them, hoping he wo...
A man is unlikely to be brought within earshot of women as they judge men's appearance, height, muscle tone, sexual technique, penis size, personal grooming, or taste in clothes--all of which we do. The fact is that women are able to view men just as...
Since middle-class Western women can best be weakened psychologically now that we are stronger materially, the beauty myth, as it has resurfaced in the last generation, has had to draw on more technological sophistication and reactionary fervor than ...
An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that “justify” the institution of slavery. The contemporary economy depends right now on the representation of women within the beauty myth. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith off...
When I ask French parents what they most want for their children, they say things like "to feel comfortable in their own skin" and "to find their path in the world." They want their kids to develop their own tastes and opinions. In fact, French paren...
Now envy and antipathy, passions irreconcilable in reason, nevertheless in fact may spring conjoined like Chang and Eng in one birth. Is Envy then such a monster? Well, though many an arraigned mortal has in hopes of mitigated penalty pleaded guilty ...
I feel guilty because for a long time I didn't allow myself a television, and I used to drop that fact in conversation to impress people. I thought it made me sound dignified. A couple of years ago, however, I visited a church in the suburbs and ther...
Stop it." Isabelle tapped a booted foot in the shallow water at the lake's edge. "Both of you. In fact, all three of you. If we don't stick together in the Seelie Court, we're dead." "But I haven't-," Clary started. "Maybe you haven't, but the way yo...
Has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you're not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced ...
Equality of opportunity is not enough. Unless we create an environment where everyone is guaranteed some minimum capabilities through some guarantee of minimum income, education, and healthcare, we cannot say that we have fair competition. When some ...
The only way to make a library safe is to lock people out of it. As long as they are allowed to read the books 'any old time they have a mind to,' libraries will remain the nurseries of heresy and independence of thought. They will, in fact, preserve...
A month ago it would have been my dream just to be in his bedroom watching a movie, but now it’s torture because I want so much more. It’s like my entire conscious state has been reduced to this toxic blend of hope and uncertainty. I hate that I ...
Then there was the realisation that I didn't actually feel that much better when I was thin(ner). In fact the 'thin' version felt worse because I lived with hunger clawing at my stomach all the time, and in fear that I was going to get fat again. Aft...
You knocked the door down." Disbelief rang in his matter-of-fact tone. "I know," she answered,unable to say anything else. Unable to look away from his body. "But it's solid oak." "I know." She felt the solid oak beneath her and a little shocked that...
Envy is the religion of the mediocre. It comforts them, it soothes their worries, and finally it rots their souls, allowing them to justify their meanness and their greed until they believe these to be virtues. Such people are convinced that the door...
Many ask what difference does it make whether man believes in a God or not. It makes a big difference. It makes all the difference in the world. It is the difference between being right and being wrong; it is the difference between truth and surmises...
When you have to face up to the fact that marriage to the man you love is really over, that's very tough, sheer agony. In that kind of harrowing situation, I always go away and cut myself off from the world. Also, I sober up immediately when there is...
Wars, wars, wars': reading up on the region I came across one moment when quintessential Englishness had in fact intersected with this darkling plain. In 1906 Winston Churchill, then the minister responsible for British colonies, had been honored by ...
[S]ometimes, when you are a food person, the possible irrelevance of what you are doing doesn’t cross your mind until it’s too late. (Once, for example, when I was just starting out in the food business, I was hired by the caper people to develop...
