You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer onc...
Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another's point of view, but instead were more and more enclosed in our own bubbles. Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead were being offered parallel but separate universes.
Everyone has known this condition of mind, though perhaps not all in the same degree; everyone will recognise it as the condition in which he has done brave things with apparent serenity; and everyone reading will say, Fortunate for Ben Hur if the fo...
But here's something that I know about friendship: Sometimes the right thing to do is to not point out that your friend hasn't touched her chicken fingers or French fries and not point that maybe she's just overreacting. Instead, you just smile and s...
I had a dream about you. We were in a canoe, and we were paddling across the desert. You said you were thirsty, and I pointed to the sand that surrounded us and said, “No, I will not urinate in your mouth.” At that point I woke up, because I real...
The storm long past, the night sky was beset with stars. Pointing upward, I asked her to pick a point of light and stay with it. Standing up, I eased Sara to her feet. Whispering into her ear, I asked, “Have you ever stood under a star... and felt ...
Grief was dagger-shaped and sharp and pointed inward. It was made of fresh loss and old sorrow. Rendered and forged and sometimes polished. Irene Finney had taken her daughter’s death and to that sorrow she’d added a long life of entitlement and ...
To be born means being compelled to choose an era, a place, a life. To exist here, now, means to lost the possibility of being countless other potential selves.. Yet once being born there is no turning back. And I think that's exactly why the fantasy...
If you want to test cosmetics, why do it on some poor animal who hasn't done anything? They should use prisoners who have been convicted of murder or rape instead. So, rather than seeing if perfume irritates a bunny rabbit's eyes, they should throw i...
To be human is to be 'a' human, a specific person with a life history and idiosyncrasy and point of view; artificial intelligence suggest that the line between intelligent machines and people blurs most when a puree is made of that identity.
Corvina must have been so different then ... really literally a different person. At what point do you make that call? At what point should you just give someone a new name? Sorry, no, you don't get to be Corvina anymore. Now you're Corvina 2.0 - a d...
Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those specia...
I discovered at an early age that I was - shall we be kina and say different? It's a better, more general word than the other one... I got sick... It was the feeling that the great, deadly pointing forefinger of society was pointing at me - and the g...
Just ask any subjugated thing- a wife, population, race, deferred dream and resource misappropriated, or continental plate; and it will tell you stories of inevitable fault lines of not-quite-stray bullets and strike slip boundaries, places where int...
My concern always has been with how—not why—people make transitions out of relationships. Many times the people I talked to did not understand why themselves. Even when they thought they knew, the reasons changed, so that what seemed to explain i...
As long as my heart's still in it, I'll keep going. If the passion's there, why stop?... There'll likely be a point of diminishing returns, a point where my strength will begin to wane. Until then, I'll just keep plodding onward, putting one foot in ...
De jure objections are arguments of claims to the effect that Christian belief, whether or not true, is at any rate unjustifiable, or rationally unjustified, or irrational, or not intellectually respectable, or contrary to sound morality, or without ...
I’m 100% certain of the quality of story I’m writing until I finish the outline and actually begin to write. At this point, I’m 100% certain the story sucks and I will never show it to another living soul. Until I type “THE END.” At this po...
Those who plead their cause in the absence of an opponent can invent to their heart's content, can pontificate without taking into account the opposite point of view and keep the best arguments for themselves, for aggressors are always quick to attac...
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are the artist’s materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feelings, the actor�...
I don't do formal debates, because formal debates where you have two people up on a stage in equal status, and each of them is given 20 minutes to give their point of view, and then 10 minutes for a rebuttal, or whatever, that creates the illusion th...