[At the scene of a murder] The cats' bloodthirst was normal; it was the way God had made them. They were hunters, they killed for food and to train their young--well maybe sometimes for sport. But this violent act by some unknown human had nothing to...
...people who believe in God think God has put human beings on earth because they think human beings are the best animal, but human beings are just an animal and they will evolve into another animal, and that animal will be cleverer and it will put h...
Humans are most imaginative when they need a means of self-destruction. If the world existed in an overflowing amount of happiness; a utopian state, then the suicide rate would dwarf any extinction level threat. Humans cannot be trusted with their ow...
Books were her refuge. Having set herself to learn the Russian language, she read every Russian book she could find. But French was the language she preferred, and she read French books indiscriminately, picking up whatever her ladies-in-waiting happ...
Our sense of what American English is has upended our relationship to articulateness, our approach to writing, and how (and whether) we impart it to the young, our interest in poetry, and our conception of what it is, and even our response to music a...
Lacking a shared language, emotions are perhaps our most effective means of cross-species communication. We can share our emotions, we can understand the language of feelings, and that's why we form deep and enduring social bonds with many other bein...
Abba is not Hebrew, the language of liturgy, but Aramaic, the language of home and everyday life … We need to be wary of the suggestion … that the correct translation of Abba is ‘Daddy.’ Abba is the intimate word of a family circle where that...
No, he focused on the one thing that he knew would keep him grounded the way the demon said he'd need to be. " go!" He opened his eyes. Behind him, he could hear Kat's voice muttering an incantation in a language he didn't recognize. It wasn't Latin,...
Ah, I feel a sadness on me, Dane. That's how the Irish people say it. In their language, you can't say, "I sad," or "I happy". They understood what we English have long forgot. We're our sadness. We're not our happiness or our pain but our language h...
Language is a piss poor attempt at telepathy is what it is. We try to put our thoughts into each other's heads through language...But half the intended meaning gets lost in the transmission, and the other half is filtered through existing assumptions...
For years, "Sorry, I don't speak French" has been the reflexive response of English-speaking Canadians to a request, a comment, or a greeting in the other official language. Part apology, part defiance, it is a declaration of the otherness. That is n...
In fact, poetry has always been like archives that peoples have continually used to serve their feelings, thoughts, national identities and cultures, and it has served as a factor uniting different historical periods. Those who had lost contact with ...
True poetry is composed of metaphors and symbols which are born in the heart, rise like clouds, and assume a celestial form; verses formed otherwise are not poetry, but only artificial words, each of which contradicts the feelings inside. The utteran...
To attempt to describe how music pervades and flavors a life feels a little like an invasion of privacy, even if the privacy is my own. Listening to music,...is finally the most inward of acts--so inward that even language, even the language of thoug...
No critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language's capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility. For English is a language that simply cannot be fixed, not can its use ...
The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a me...
Are there any two words in all of the English language more closely twinned than courage and cowardice? I do not think there is a man alive who will not yearn to possess the former and dread to be accused of the latter. One is held to be the apogee o...
In rational inquiry, we idealize to selected domains in such a way (we hope) as to permit us to discover crucial features of the world. Data and observations, in the sciences, have an instrumental character. They are of no particular interest in them...
I used to spend so much time reacting and responding to everyone else that my life had no direction. Other people's lives, problems, and wants set the course for my life. Once I realized it was okay for me to think about and identify what I wanted, r...
I was unaccustomed to men in general, having spent my adolescence in all-female group homes with only an occasional male therapist or teacher, and I couldn’t remember having ever been in such proximity to a man who was both young and handsome. Gran...
What about Danny Thomas?" Uncle Hal asks. "What happened to him? "Dead," Uncle Abdelhafiz says. "Nice Lebanese boy." "Never mind about Danny Thomas, look what happened to your whole family! Look at your cousin Farouq, Great Uncle Ziad, Auntie Seena a...
