Too often, contemporary continental philosophers take the “other” of philosophy to mean literature, but not religion, which is for them just a little too wholly other, a little beyond their much heralded tolerance of alterity. They retain an anta...
Oskar Schindler: I've been speaking to Goeth. Itzhak Stern: I know the destination. These are the evacuation orders, I'm to help arrange the shipments, put myself on the last train. Oskar Schindler: That's not what I was going to say. I made Goeth pr...
Ariel: But without my voice, how can I. Ursula: You'll have your looks. Your pretty face and don't underestimate the importance of "body language." Ha! [singing] Ursula: The men up there don't like a lot of blabber / They think a girl who gossips is ...
Maximillian Cohen: Restate my assumptions: One, Mathematics is the language of nature. Two, Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. Three: If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge. Therefore, there are p...
[while interrogating the boys, Smecker is surprised that they are fluent in Russian] Paul Smecker: You speak any other languages? Murphy: Aye. Our mother insisted on it. Paul Smecker: French? Murphy: [in French] How do you think he figured all this o...
In my opinion it is not the writer's job to solve such problems as God, pessimism, etc; his job is merely to record who, under what conditions, said or thought what about God or pessimism. The artist is not meant to be a judge of his characters and w...
In the language of the day it is customary to describe a certain sort of book as “escapist” literature. As I understand it, the adjective implies, a little condescendingly, that the life therein depicted cannot be identified with the real life wh...
Does a cat know he is a cat? Does a dog know he is a dog? Does nature know it is called nature? Does this planet know its name Earth? Does Sun know its name and its category as a star? Does Universe know that it is Universe? Does God knows that he is...
I'm talking to a journalist and I really have nothing to say anymore, this is already uncomfortable. I feel the pain coming already. The brutal pain, when one day I should read your edit of whatever I say, because no matter what I say, no matter how ...
You’re a wonderful dancer, Ria.” “Mademoiselle Geraldine’s takes such things seriously.” “Ah. And how many ways do you know to kill me, while we dance?” “Only two, but give me time.” “You have lovely eyes. Has anyone ever told you...
...only very few - only humans, as far as we know - achieve the second level of transcendent movement. Through this, the environment is de-restricted to become the world as an integral whole of manifest and latent elements. The second step is the wor...
Author's Prayer If I speak for the dead, I must leave this animal of my body, I must write the same poem over and over for the empty page is a white flag of their surrender. If I speak of them, I must walk on the edge of myself, I must live as a blin...
All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated... As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upo...
On my seventh birthday, my father swore, for the first of many times, that I would die facedown in a cesspool. On that same occasion, my mother, with all the accompanying mystery and elevated language appropriate for a prominent diviner, turned her c...
Historians like a quiet life, and usually they get it. For the most part, history moves at a deliberate pace, working its changes subtly and incrementally. Nations and their institutions harden into shape or crumble away like sediment carried by the ...
I go downstairs and the books blink at me from the shelves. Or stare. In a trick of the light, a row of them seems to shift very slightly, like a curtain blown by the breeze through an open window. Red is next to blue is next to cream is adjacent to ...
English was such a dense, tight language. So many hard letters, like miniature walls. Not open with vowels the way Spanish was. Our throats open, our mouths open, our hearts open. In English, the sounds were closed. They thudded to the floor. And yet...
When I speak in Christian terms or Buddhist terms I'm simply selecting for the moment a dialect. Christian words for me represent the comforting vocabulary of the place I came from hometown voices saying more than the language itself can convey about...
I fell in love the moment I saw her in her grandfather's kitchen, her dark curls crashing over her Portuguese shoulders. 'Would you like to drink coffee?' she smiled. 'I'm really not that thirsty.' 'What? What you say?' Her English wasn't too good. N...
...unfortunately, it's true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. If you're not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it...
As a people, we have been tolled farther and farther away from the facts of what we have done by the romanticizers, whose bait is nothing more than the wishful insinuation that we have done no harm. Speaking a public language of propaganda, uninfluen...
