Sam: I wonder if we'll ever be put into songs or tales. Frodo: [turns around] What? Sam: I wonder if people will ever say, 'Let's hear about Frodo and the Ring.' And they'll say 'Yes, that's one of my favorite stories. Frodo was really courageous, wa...
As the chapters took shape, a change came over her. It was the double-sided recognition that this book, the last that she would write, might achieve esteem and success equal to her great novel, but that its emotional heart would lie in her own unhapp...
We like to think of individuals as unique. Yet if this is true of everyone, then we all share the same quality, namely our uniqueness. What we have in common is the fact that we are all uncommon. Everybody is special, which means that nobody is. The ...
Pride had a very similar character with Lust. He was difficult to satisfy, but rather than desiring tasty foods, Pride desired valuable possessions. Man clung to Pride more than the other two because he was the firstborn son. Pride had a very sensiti...
When I met a truly beautiful girl, I would tell her that if she spent the night with me, I would write a novel or a story about her. This usually worked; and if her name was to be in the title of the story, it almost always worked. Then, later, when ...
It is a fundamental truth that the responsibilities of motherhood cannot be successfully delegated. No, not to day-care centers, not to schools, not to nurseries, not to babysitters. We become enamored with men’s theories such as the idea of presch...
individuals are concerned not with the moral issue of realizing these standards, but with the amoral issue of engineering a convincing impression that these standards are being realized. Our activity, then, is largely concerned with moral matters, bu...
A mistake is the name we give to any action in which we perceive a difference between what we intended and what has occurred. Intention fuels every dramatic action, including the writing of dramatic stories, which involves a series of dramatic action...
If you expose what it is that we’re doing, if you inform your fellow citizens about all the things that we’re doing in the dark, we will destroy you. This is what their spate of prosecutions of whistleblowers have [ ] been about. It’s what tryi...
There was indeed a caste system in Maycomb, but to my mind it worked this way: the older citizens, the present generation of people who had lived side by side for years and years, were utterly predictable to one another: they took for granted attitud...
Of course one’s sense of identification with the nation is inflected by all kinds of particulars, including one’s class, race, gender, and sexual identification. … But [regarding] national character …, aside from references to a national aest...
I was working with a Crookes tube covered by a shield of black cardboard. A piece of barium platino-cyanide paper lay on the bench there. I had been passing a current through the tube, and I noticed a peculiar black line across the paper. ... The eff...
The level of intelligence has been tremendously increased, because people are thinking and communicating in terms of screens, and not in lettered books. Much of the real action is taking place in what is called cyberspace. People have learned how to ...
Die Gesamtheit dieser Produktionsverhältnisse bildet die ökonomische Struktur der Gesellschaft, die reale Basis, worauf sich ein juristischer und politischer Überbau erhebt und welcher bestimmte gesellschaftliche Bewußtseinsformen entsprechen. Di...
We are not consumers. For most of humanity’s existence, we were makers, not consumers: we made our clothes, shelter, and education, we hunted and gathered our food. We are not addicts. “I propose that most addictions come from our surrendering ou...
You want to know how to stop this killer? Forgive yourself, and he’ll disappear from your life forever.” “Thanks. I’ll be sure to do that.” And I know: 1. This is almost the same conversation I’ve had with myself many times before. 2. Gor...
You win over people just like you win over a dog. You see a dog passing down the street with an old bone in his mouth. You don't grab the bone from him and tell him it's not good for him. He'll growl at you. It's the only thing he has. But you throw ...
A person with less knowledge and more self-confidence (which is primarily a way of thinking and acting) will often run circles around a person with more knowledge and less self-confidence; which means that self-confidence has the upper hand to knowle...
[Public housing projects] are not lacking in natural leaders,' [Ellen Lurie, a social worker in East Harlem] says. 'They contain people with real ability, wonderful people many of them, but the typical sequence is that in the course of organization l...
I realized at that moment - observing his form move further away without once turning back - that I’d already begun to rebuild the imaginary wall between us. I was shielding my heart with stone cold feelings again, the only way I knew to protect it...
Do you trust Arman, Highness?' 'Yes, but--' 'No buts. Either you trust Him or you don't.' Achan shifted in his chair. 'Maybe I don't, then.' 'I agree. you don't trust Him fully or you'd know you did. Arman wants your trust, Highness. When he asks som...
