Words cannot express my disappointment that I must pass on the invitation to once again witness your gelatinous buttocks swaying as you try to climb a greased pole naked in search of athletic glory. Sadly, the last occasion on which I witnessed this ...
I know this world is far from perfect. I am not the type to mistake a streetlight for the moon. I know our wounds are deep as the Atlantic. But every ocean has a shoreline and every shoreline has a tide that is constantly returning to wake the songbi...
Recognising such dimensions implicit to the reading experience can distract from the immediacy of our response; it can substitute literary archaeology for novelistic reality. That is one pole. But the other extreme is equally limiting. By failing to ...
... Up telephone poles, Which rear, half out of leavage As though they would shriek Like things smothered by their own Green, mindless, unkillable ghosts. In Georgia, the legend says That you must close your windows At night to keep it out of the hou...
Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty. Mind you, though this may seem to justify the...
I was hungry when I left Pyongyang. I wasn't hungry just for a bookshop that sold books that weren't about Fat Man and Little Boy. I wasn't ravenous just for a newspaper that had no pictures of F.M. and L.B. I wasn't starving just for a TV program or...
Names are powerful and are prophecies of the future. The name you are called is a sign of what you are and what you would become.
The nights were long, like the braids of a pretty girl, and the days were short, like a girl's sense. ("The North")
This far north the sun was still up, although very low, riding through the mountains as if looking for something it lost on the ground.
It's quite widespread in rock culture, that mythology of the shooting star. I'd rather be the North star. As bob (Dylan) says, you can navigate by it.
It would be easy to assume that the open letter is a symptom of the Internet age. Such is not the case. In 1774, Benjamin Franklin wrote an open letter to the prime minister of Great Britain, Lord North - a satirical call for the imposition of martia...
I'm a very brave person. I can go to North Vietnam, I can challenge my government, but I can't challenge the man I'm with if means I'm going to end up alone.
Even at the United Nations, where legend has it that the building was designed so that there could be no corner offices, the expanse of glass in individual offices is said to be a dead giveaway as to rank. Five windows are excellent, one window not s...
...maybe you think up North is way different from down South. Don't believe it and don't count on it. Custom is just as real as law and can be just as dangerous.
My confidence was of the hothouse variety, carefully cultivated under highly regulated conditions. One wrong look, one mean comment, and my facade would wither.
But a bond is a bond. And when you’re young and haven’t yet learned to live in your own solitude, even a destructive bond can seem better than none.
Jacob: "Let her stare." Terra: "What?" Jacob: "Yeah most of the starers are just curious. Smile back. That's what I used to do.
The more people I am with, Dorrigo thought, the more alone I feel.
In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss.
What other people may think of the rightness or wrongness is nothing in comparison to my own deep knowledge, my innate conviction that it was wrong.
Loyalty and obedience to wisdom and justice are fine; but it is still finer to defy arbitrary power, unjustly and cruelly used--not on behalf of ourselves, but on behalf of others more helpless.
