What remains once the war is won? Fame. Songs. A kingdom of corpses. His name too heavy in my mouth. What do we become in death? Shadows. Longing. Regret, regret, regret. What do we keep once we are ghosts? The blood under my fingernails. His crooked...
In the bitter waves of woe, Beaten and tossed about By the sullen winds that blow From the desolate shores of doubt, When the anchors that faith had cast Are dragging in the gale, I am quietly holding fa...
My love is as a fever, longing still For that which longer nurseth the disease; Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill, The uncertain sickly appetite to please. My reason, the physician to my love, Angry that his prescriptions are not kept, Hath...
is a type of our best — our rarest. Electrical, I was going to say, beyond anyone, perhaps, ever was: charged, surcharged. Not a founder of new philosophies — not of that build. But a towering magnetic presence, filling the air about with light, ...
On the second floor was the office in which Houston pounded an ancient typewriter with two fingers, always setting an example of unceasing hard work for his admiring students. They had no hint of the fact that their hard-driving dean had contracted t...
Anyway. I’m not allowed to watch TV, although I am allowed to rent documentaries that are approved for me, and I can read anything I want. My favorite book is A Brief History of Time, even though I haven’t actually finished it, because the math i...
today we read of Don Quixote with a bitter taste in the mouth, it is almost an ordeal, which would make us seem very strange and incomprehensible to the author and his contemporaries, – they read it with a clear conscience as the funniest of books,...
It’s Curt Schilling and his bloody sock staring down the Yankees in the Bronx. It’s Derek Lowe taking the mound the very next night to complete the most improbable comeback in baseball history—and then seven days later clinching the World Serie...
Belize: Hell or heaven? [Roy indicates "Heaven" through a glance] Belize: Like San Francisco. Roy Cohn: A city. Good. I was worried... it'd be a garden. I hate that shit. Belize: Mmmm. Big city. Overgrown with weeds, but flowering weeds. On every cor...
Earth processes that seem trivially slow in human time can accomplish stunning work in geologic time. Let the Colorado River erode its bed by 1/100th of an inch each year (about the thickness of one of your fingernails.) Multiply it by six million ye...
To the men and women who changed Cheryl Hersha's life, she was a continuation of the research that had first been conducted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Dr. Morton Prince. He encountered a woman named Miss Beauchamp, a nurs...
Hey, Pedro, could you get your shopping cart out of my faculty parking space? Yes, I know you live on the street. But you know how hard it is to find a parking spot on the Upper West Side. After all, you used to be one of my best students! So how's t...
Sometimes we are written down in books. Or, someone tells a story in which our name figures. And so we live on, through someone else’s voice… These are the indelible marks others make of us, like the watermarks of high tides, names carved into ba...
Au temps de La Barbarie à visage humain, je disais, comme Camus : l'idéologie est un multiplicateur de massacres ; on tue d'autant plus, et en d'autant plus grand nombre, qu'on le fait dans la bonne conscience de hâter, ce faisant, l'avènement du...
Fin de l'Histoire (...) La panne du négatif, la fin de la dialectique, le renoncement au labeur technicien et à son inlassable souci de métamorphoser le donné, annonçaient-ils une humanité oisive mais heureuse, presque opulente, qui, en échang...
Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics rememb...
I used to feel spiritually inferior because I had not experienced the more spectacular manifestations of the Spirit and could not point to any bona fide “miracles” in my life. Increasingly, though, I have come to see that what I value may differ ...
For it is not we who call God by these names. We do not invent them. On the contrary, if it depended on us, we would be silent about him, try to forget him, and disown all his names. We take no delight in the knowledge of his ways. We tend continuall...
[from the Extended and Deleted Scenes. The class is discussing "Watership Down"] Karen Pommeroy: When the other rabbits hear of Fiver's vision, do they believe him? Donnie: Why should we care? Karen Pommeroy: Because the rabbits are us, Donnie. Donni...
Mike Wallace: In the real world, when you get to where I am, there are other considerations. Lowell Bergman: Like what? Corporate responsibility? What, are we talking celebrity here? Mike Wallace: I'm not talking celebrity, vanity, CBS. I'm talking a...
Sarah Connor: [narrating] Dyson listened while the Terminator laid it all down: Skynet, Judgment Day, the history of things to come. It's not everyday you find out that you're responsible for three billion deaths. He took it pretty well. Miles Dyson:...
