I think that the thematic, formal history of the literary form ultimately harkens back to a different political system. That is to say, a feudal order: the aristocratic dispensation of leisure time, the refinements of the self. With the shift from fe...
And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were ...
Juliet by Ann Fortier. The Maestro (Chapter5) ... the slight nausea he was feeling must be somewhat near what God was feeling every minute of every day. If indeed He felt anything. He was, after all, a divine being, and it was entirely conceivable th...
Nixon is fascinating because he's our most alienated president. Everybody felt that they never knew who he was - that's palpable in the histories. His face is so cartoony that he's become this cartoon figure. I never really related to the romanticiza...
History has taught us that often lies serve her better than the truth, for man is sluggish and has to be led through the desert for forty years before each step in his development. And he has to be driven through the desert with threats and promises,...
Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer br...
When an entire segment of the world is burned and reduced to a lawless battleground for thugs and mercenaries, a land where government does not exist, where the slate of history is being wiped out and hope has drowned in gallons of innocent blood, th...
... the slight nausea he was feeling must be somewhat neat what God was feeling every minute of every day. If indeed He felt anything. He was, after all, a divine being, and it was entirely conceivable that divinity was incompatible with emotion. If ...
...he is thinking about thoughts; so many thoughts piled up, such a quantity of half-remembered knowledge, so many emotions brought up from the well to spill out: the unrolling of history - a river into which you can't step twice, a collection of bio...
I don't think there's any deep psychological reason. It isn't comparable, say, to America's involvement with Vietnam and the emotional scars that that has left behind. A much more cogent way of looking at it is that the British have suddenly realized...
All of us, even when we think we have noted every tiny detail, resort to set pieces which have already been staged often enough by others.[...] Our concern with history, so Hilary's thesis ran, is a concern with pre-formed images already imprinted on...
Let that be a reminder to you that the past is one thing, but what we make of it, the conclusions we draw, is another. History can be many things, depending on how we read it, just as the future can be many things, depending on how we live it. There ...
Edie Stall: My husband does not know you. He wouldn't know you, somebody like you. Carl Fogaty: Oh, he knows Carl Fogarty all right. He knows me intimately. See? [points to his clouded left eye] Carl Fogaty: This isn't a completely dead eye, it still...
Now that young girls like my twelve-year-old friend Mai are being exposed to modern Western women like me through crowds of tourists, they're experiencing those first critical moments of cultural hesitation. I call this the "Wait-a-Minute Moment" - t...
This Christian claim [of universal validity] is naturally offensive to the adherents of every other religious system. It is almost as offensive to modern man, brought up in the atmosphere of relativism, in which tolerance is regarded almost as the hi...
We ought not to speak only about the economics of globalization, but about the psychology of globalization. It's like the psychology of a battered woman being faced with her husband again and being asked to trust him again. That's what is happening. ...
You think that drinking with a serial killer takes you into the midnight currents of the culture? I say bullshit. There's been twelve TV documentaries, three movies and eight books about me. I'm more popular than any of these designed-by-pedophile po...
But the fantasy kingdom and trappings of success soon lost their luster, as I discovered that the most prestigious and remunerative of my resume's way stations was also the most tedious and unfulfilling I had ever experienced. This paradox only made ...
Time. So much of our human experience is bound up in time, I muse. It reflects in our everyday colloquialisms, and drives so much of our activities. Yet this obsession with the passing of the hours is a relatively modern phenomenon; an inevitable pro...
If the moderns really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem or Christmas Day never rang out more...
The novel was born with the Modern Era, which made man, to quote Heidegger, the "only real subject," the ground for everything. It is largely through the novel that man as an individual was established on the European scene. Away from the novel, in o...
