The appearance of the bones of quadrupeds, especially those of complete bodies in the strata, tells us either that the layer itself which carries them was in earlier times dry land or that dry land was at least formed in the immediate area.
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.
The press is still investing itself, it seems to me, in a sort of cynicism. It comes out better for them if they can predict hard times, bogging down, sniping, attrition.
A big mistake people make when they are trying to lose weight is that they stop eating. They'll eat salads once a day and then their body starts trying to protect itself and holds onto the fat.
I respect traditional people - they have the eyes which see value in the tarnished. This is a gift in itself. Tradition requires a wealth of discipline in order to be adhered to, hence it is rarely found in youth.
The wrong approaches to faith and to skepticism are equally detrimental to the path. For the former declares its answers too soon and is later found false; the latter rejects sound answers altogether and hashes itself useless.
Baseball is a slow, boring, complex, cerebral game that doesn't lend itself to histrionics. You 'take in' a baseball game, something odd to say about a football or basketball game, with the clock running and the bodies flying.
My character is somebody who is smaller in stature and yet who's strong, so to see the fighting situations between people who are not generally thought of being strong is in itself unusual and therefore interesting, I think.
A novel, even a social realist one, can't simply be a comprehensive rendering of what is. A novel requires a special angle or approach, whether in structure or language or theme, to justify itself.
Happenstance is the myth of the simple mind, for it is the deliberate genius of God that what appears entirely disjointed always reveals itself to be stunningly seamless. And it is in reflecting on such stunning ingenuity that our faith becomes seaml...
Human material seems to have one major defect: it does not like to be considered merely as human material. It finds it hard to endure the feeling that it must resign itself to passive acceptance of changes introduced from above.
Most projects that I've done are really not about the project. They're about what's going on inside and around, that journey that we're all on, and what I can do to help that journey further itself and be of encouragement to somebody.
When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
In 'Pictures from an Institution,' Randall Jarrell was able to transcend the academic novel by simply ignoring it, writing a comedy with no plot at all beyond his own pleasure in language and humanity itself.
I managed to get onto 'The Hobbit,' which is a story in itself. I missed the main round of auditions but managed to get a foot in the door at the last second - just as I came down with dysentery.
It's like doughnut holes. Whether you take a doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.
It seems as if everybody in the country was getting impatient to get his or her particular soldier out of the Army and to upset the carefully arranged system of points for retirement which we had arranged with the approval of the Army itself.
With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.
When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.
Hackney at certain epochs has given itself suburban airs and graces, before being slapped down and consigned once more to the dump bin of aborted ambition.
'The Blade Itself' was my first book. Probably I should've tried a few short stories first, but for some reason I decided to begin with Everest.
