Something is missing, and it's something not so easy to name as semiabsent husbands, not so easy to point to as a lack of work, or too much work, or a lack of adequate child care. It's the sense that life should have led up to more than it has. A sen...
The book that simply demands to be read, for no good reason, is asking us to change our lives by putting aside what we usually think of as good reasons. It's asking us to stop calculating. It's asking us to do something for the plain old delight and ...
Endlessly foremost, the recollection of youth’s fount flows deep in the psyche of an aged man. The loss of a first true love is never quite lost, for he sees her in the faces of passing strangers, is haunted in the quiet of his solitude as he waltz...
Cold comradeship do stars provide. They light the closer, inner side Of night's vast weight, which, chill and clear, Pulls on us like some puppeteer. Its unseen threads to heads and hearts Attached, it acts us through our parts, From birth's first cr...
In the agricultural age, women conceived younger and had many more children because children were economic assets as workers on the farm. In the postindustrial age, children are emotional assets but economic liabilities, costing both a middle-class h...
I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sent...
We know the value of the things for which we suffer. In this modern day and age, things and people are not actually losing value; but it is the knowledge of the value that is lost. Because in this day and age, everyone wants something that is easy. T...
Are not lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and...
Carmelia Montiel, a twenty-year-old virgin, had just bathed in orange-blossom water and was strewing rosemary leaves on Pilar Ternera's bed when the shot rang out. Aureliano José had been destined to find with her the happiness that Amaranta had den...
Hermione: It's not going to work. Fred: Oh yeah? George: Why's that, Granger? Hermione: You see this? [gestures to a glowing circle on the floor] Hermione: This is an age line. Dumbledore drew it himself. Fred: So? Hermione: So a genius like Dumbledo...
Lord Naritsugu Matsudaira: Hanbei? Hanbei Kitou: Huh? Lord Naritsugu Matsudaira: You think the age of war was like this? Hanbei Kitou: Perhaps Lord Naritsugu Matsudaira: It's magnificent. With death comes gratitude for life. If a man has lived in vai...
Wanda Maximoff: I can show you what you truly fear! Ulysses Klaue: You know what I fear? Cuttlefish! Fish deep in the sea, with lights and big teeth. You going to show me a giant cuttlefish? You won't. You won't do business with me, and I do business...
Ultron: Do you see the beauty of it? The inevitability? You rise, only to fall. You, Avengers, you are my meteor. My swift and terrible sword and the Earth will crack with the weight of your failure. Purge me from your computers; turn my own flesh ag...
[Ultron begins to transfer his mind into an artificial body] Wanda Maximoff: I can read his mind now... [does so, and screams with horror] Wanda Maximoff: You said... you said we were going to destroy the Avengers... make a better world! Ultron: It w...
And Siobhan says people go on holidays to see new things and relax, but it wouldn’t make me relaxed and you can see new things by looking at earth under a microscope or drawing the shape of the solid made when 3 circular rods of equal thickness int...
Getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard. Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning to think about these things in a new wa...
We live in a global village, Neel, where billions of voices babble simultaneously, and in this village a new hierarchy is being established, a new caste-system is being created. Only this time, it is money that sets the tone. Whoever has the most mon...
Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response...
I was lucky to live in New York when it was dangerous and edgy and cheap enough to play host to young, penniless artists. That was the era of "coffee shops" as they were defined in New York—cheap restaurants open round the clock where you could eat...
A final word should be said concerning the status of free blacks. Before the American Revolution this status had been ambiguous, and the number of free blacks was insignificant. <...> A rash of new laws, similar to the later Black Codes of Reconstruc...
I knew he was unreliable, but he was fun to be with. He was a child’s ideal companion, full of surprises and happy animal energy. He enjoyed food and drink. He liked to try new things. He brought home coconuts, papayas, mangoes, and urged them on o...
