I watched as Humphrey Bogart’s character used beans as a metaphor for the relative unimportance in the wider world of his relationship with Ingrid Bergman’s character, and chose logic and decency ahead of his selfish emotional desires. The quanda...
If our reputation rests on the decisions we make, then Abishag has impeccable taste. If fragrance is worn to make a personal statement, then the unchosen Abishag has publicly proclaimed her allegiance. She has put on the scent of her lord, for her lo...
His statement flew in the face of everything I knew. He thought of relationships as finite, like a pie that could only be cut into so many pieces. Take a piece away, and there was that much less for him. I knew, however, that relationships are more l...
And I love Jane Austen's use of language too--the way she takes her time to develop a phrase and gives it room to grow, so that these clever, complex statements form slowly and then bloom in my mind. Beethoven does the same thing with his cadence and...
The missing girl—there had been unceasing news reports, always flashing to that achingly ordinary school portrait of the vanished teen, you know the one, with the rainbow-swirl background, the girl's hair too straight, her smile too self-conscious,...
The intangible, as you can guess, creates some decidedly strange and perceived dichotomies for scientific interpretations. Ask a scientist what the definition of electricity is and he might rattle off, “It is the physical phenomena arising from the...
And are you going to explain why you consider competing with me to be the most sincere form of compliment?” “Of course I am,” Lightsong said. “My dear, have you ever known me to make an inflammatorily ridiculous statement without providing an...
When I opened the last [401k] statement, I jumped out of the window. True, it was the kitchen window and I only fell two feet, so the whole scene lacked drama, but I thought that was the required reaction to extreme financial turmoil in America. And ...
I write because I'm free, because I can, because I will. I write because I must, because I'm breathing, because I'd go crazy otherwise, because it's who I am. I write to make a statement, to share my thoughts, to discover myself, to express my ideas....
I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew bu...
Madeleine Albright has said that there is 'a special place in hell for women who don't help each other.' What are the implications of this statement? Would it be an argument in favor of the candidacy of Mrs. Clinton? Would this mean that Elizabeth Ed...
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer r...
Detective Hal Vukovich: I hate these press cases, especially the weird press cases. Where you going? Lieutenant Ed Traxler: To make a statement. Maybe make these jackals work for us. If I can get on the tube by 11:00, maybe she'll call us. Well, how ...
President Nixon: You want to make a statement? Kill me, fine! But spare everyone else! Erik Lehnsherr: Very heroic, Mr. President. But you have no intention of sparing any of us. The future of our species begins now! [gets distracted, Mystique reveal...
I was impressed by the scene in Apollo 13 where the astronauts request confirmation of their calculations and several people at Mission Control dive for their slide rules. For several months after that, my standard response to statements like "We mus...
Do not put statements in the negative form. And don't start sentences with a conjunction. If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing. Never use a long word when a diminu...
It was always so hot, and everyone was so polite, and everything was all surface but underneath it was like a bomb waiting to go off. I always felt that way about the South, that beneath the smiles and southern hospitality and politeness were a lot o...
One has to understand that equality ends up by infiltrating the world of politics as it does everywhere else. It would be impossible to imagine men forever unequal in one respect, yet equal in others; they must, in the end, come to be equal in all. N...
Democracy suits Europeans today partly because it is associated with the triumph of capitalism and partly because it involves less commitment or intrusion into their lives than any of the alternatives. Europeans accept democracy because they no longe...
This may seem labouring the obvious, but in Japan one meets intelligent people who claim that ‘logic’ is something invented in the West to allow Westerners to win discussions. Indeed, the belief is widespread that the Japanese can as happily do w...
Some people believe the alternative to bad religion is secularism, but that's wrong . . . . The answer to bad religion is better religion--prophetic rather than partisan, broad and deep instead of narrow, and based on values as opposed to ideology.
