When they talk about family values, it's in a repressive way, as if our American tradition were only the Puritan tradition or the 19th century oppressive tradition. The Christian tradition.
I was 13 when I had my first bout of insomnia. My family was in Reykjavik, Iceland, for the summer, and day never really became night.
My greatest pleasure is spending time with my family: my husband and daughter, but also my mother, my three sisters, and their families.
The history of fiction is about family - an inexhaustible subject for literature. We are creatures driven by emotions that are on high display in intimate relations - inside the family.
I am a Protestant. I am a communicant at the Church of the Holy Family, an Episcopal church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Some forms of motor neuron disease are genetically linked, but I have no indication that my kind is. No other member of my family has had it. But I would be in favour of abortion if there was a high risk.
Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.
The reason Jennifer Lawrence is allowed to be a body-positive role model to young girls and 'chubby' women is because she is representative of conventional beauty.
I've always thought of beauty therapy, 'alternative' treatments and the like as the female equivalent of brothels - for essentially self-deceiving people who feel a bit hollow and have to pay to be touched.
I think one of my favorite things about Paris is the ever-present, nonstop beauty of the city. So I would just walk as much as possible.
If you can visualize the whole of spring and see Paradise with the eye of belief, you may understand the utter majesty of everlasting Beauty. If you respond to that Beauty with the beauty of belief and worship, you will be a most beautiful creature.
'Black Beauty,' by Anna Sewell, remains a star-dusted memory because my mom read it aloud to my sister and me at night for months. I was no more than 7.
The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.
I like to think of the world's greatest athlete coming up to bat against me - Tiger Woods, Wayne Gretzky, I don't care who it is - and I'm looking at him thinking, you have no chance.
These syllables, about 2,300 in number, were mixed together and then drawn out by chance and used to construct series of different lengths, several of which each time formed the material for a test.
I have always admired the work of Phil Farmer and was glad for the chance to work with him. Readers today may be too young to remember his classics like The Lovers.
When I started playing the game of baseball, the more I played and the better numbers I got, the more I started thinking about the Hall of Fame. But I never thought I had a chance to be there.
I was branded a Negro in the States and had to act accordingly. They wouldn't even give me a chance in the big leagues because I was a Negro, yet they accepted every other nationality under the sun.
Despite the situation in Cuba, I had a chance to play on the national team; and compared to other baseball players and other people in Cuba, I had the opportunity to live at a level that was not very high class but in the middle.
It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection.
They say change gets more difficult as we get older - each year we're more stuck in our ways, more reluctant to learn something new.
