Here then we are first to consider a book, presented to us by a barbarous and ignorant people, written in an age when they were still more barbarous, and in all probability long after the facts which it relates, corroborated by no concurring testimon...
I closed the door and sank into my desk chair. My heart was pounding even harder. I felt like someone who had just staggered out of her car after an accident on a freeway. This was different from the cockroach and the books and the Barbie. I’d been...
So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instea...
Seriously, I’m totally weirded out by the girly nature of this conversation. And yet, it’s kinda like you’re growing up. Do you think Judy Blume made a book about adolescent vampires? Are You There God, It’s Me, Merit?” Mallory snorted, obv...
lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, dri...
It is generally understood that a modern-day book may honorably be based upon an older one, especially since, as Dr. Johnson observed, no man likes owing anything to his contemporaries. The repeated but irrelevant points of congruence between Joyce's...
So I'm back again to the eternal question, the one that has plagued me all my life: How Do Other People Do It? How come they were given life's rule book and I missed out? Where was I when God was dispensing capability and cop on? Looking at shoes, pr...
Elend, my dearest Elend who brings a pile of books to each ball he attends and ignores everybody in favour of having a nice read. Elend who has to grow up rather suddenly in the face of the revolution he has read extensively about, but never thought ...
Now that you’re here, now that they know you exist, you’ll never be free again. Ever. We’re prisoners to our books, our fates planned long before we were born. You’re no different than us. Fight your fate all you want, but deep down you know ...
Cassandra wondered at the mind's cruel ability to toss up flecks of the past. Why, as she neared her life's end, her grandmother's head should ring with the voices of people long since gone. Was it always this way? Did those with passage booked on de...
I propitiated the knife-wielding deities with presents of books. The gifts to them and the head of nursing were also meant to acknowledge that although people get paid to do their jobs, you cannot pay someone to do their job passionately and wholehea...
Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it�...
Have you thought of an ending?" "Yes, several, and all are dark and unpleasant." "Oh, that won't do! Books ought to have good endings. How would this do: and they all settled down and lived together happily ever after?" "It will do well, if it ever c...
A penis is a penis, but a hard-on is more like a message you send to other people. It’s a desire, not a body part.” Brandt swiveled his chair around to face Donnelly, “‘It’s a desire, not a body part’? What kind of fucked-up angry feminis...
When an editor works with an author, she cannot help seeing into the medicine cabinet of his soul. All the terrible emotions, the desire for vindications, the paranoia, and the projection are bottled in there, along with all the excesses of envy, des...
Practically, speaking up against street harassment is not about being a hero, getting credit points to be in the good books of a girl or a chance to impress anyone. It is about making sure that everyone has the right to enjoy that spring breeze, gold...
You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it...fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in the flight fr...
Sleep my little baby-oh Sleep until you waken When you wake you'll see the world If I'm not mistaken... Kiss a lover Dance a measure, Find your name And buried treasure... Face your life Its pain, Its pleasure, Leave no path untaken.
We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the myth...
There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is withi...
The shame that tormented me was all the more corrosive for having no very clear origin: I didn't know why I felt so tainted, and worthless, and wrong-only that I did, and whenever I looked up from my books I was swamped by slimy waters rushing in fro...
