[T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude ...
They can fatten me up. They can give me a full body polish, dress me up, and make me beautiful again. They can design dream weapons that come to life in my hands, but they will never again brainwash me into the necessity of using them. I no longer fe...
I told you the truth... Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent v...
It is as if I have entered what the Tibetans call the Bardo-literally, between-two-existences- a dreamlike hallucination that precedes reincarnation, not necessarily in human form…In case I should need them, instructions for passage through the Bar...
So what does forgiveness really do for you? Is it even a real thing? Or is it something humans just made up to make ourselves feel better? Or is it like the concept of time, something that actually exists, but our little brains can't really comprehen...
We human beings glimpse lofty ideals, catch ourselves betraying them, and sink to suicidal despair--despair from which only the love of our friends can save us, since friends see in us those nobler qualities we ourselves, out of long familiarity, hav...
The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus ...
The moon is a loyal companion. It never leaves. It’s always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do. Every day it’s a different version of itself. Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes stro...
If there’s anything I’ve learned it’s that love is an unstoppable human drive, fierce and universal, and that sex is the physical manifestation of love. And that sex without love is missing the whole damn point. Sex brings us home to love.
I want to take all the pain of humanity, ball it up into a compressed, black 16-pound sphere, add three holes in a triangular formation to it, and use it to bowl a strike.
Coitus can scarcely be said to take place in a vacuum; although of itself it appears a biological and physical activity, it is set so deeply within the larger context of human affairs that it serves as a charged microcosm of the variety of attitudes ...
Byproduct of the circulation of commodities, human circulation considered as a form of consumption, tourism comes down fundamentally to the freedom to go and see what has become banal. The economic planning of the frequenting of different places is a...
We are leading as thorough a study of 'alienation's positive pole' as of its negative pole. As a consequence of our diagnosis of the poverty of wealth, we are able to establish the world map of the extreme wealth of poverty. These speaking maps of a ...
Lissa looked taken aback, but Jared Sage—my father-in-law now, I realized―showed nothing but contempt. 'This is ridiculous. Humans and Moroi can't be married. That's your way, as well as ours. This isn’t a real marriage.' 'Not according to the ...
I wanted to listen to him, but I did not want to answer now. That strange responsibility we feel towards others when they speak, to offer them the solace of any answer. Poor humans! And anyway he had not asked a question. He was merely floating there...
Our sense of the full range of human nature, like our diet, has been steadily reduced. No matter how nourishing it might be, anything wild gets pulled - though as we'll see, some of the weeds growing in us have roots reaching deep into our shared pas...
Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their respo...
here she is, all mine, trying her best to give me all she can. How could I ever hurt her? But I didn’t understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyon...
You see, it's really quite simple. A simile is just a mode of comparison employing 'as' and 'like' to reveal the hidden character or essence of whatever we want to describe, and through the use of fancy, association, contrast, extension, or imaginati...
Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads. The ancient Asiatics knew this well enough, and in the Buddhist Yoga an exact technique was devised for unmasking the illusion of the personality. The human merry-go...
But we had ceased to hate. Belsen had some way cured us of all hate, at least all hate of any human creature. We had learned what evil there is in the world or beyond the world, what happens to a man or a group of men-call them a nation if you will- ...
