You ask me if I do not think that men are strange beings - I do indeed, I have often thought so - and I think too that the mode of bringing them up is strange, they are not half sufficiently guarded from temptation - Girls are protected as if they we...
Sometimes you go through things that seem huge at the time, like a mysterious glowing cloud devouring your entire community. While they're happening, they feel like the only thing that matters and you can hardly imagine that there's a world out there...
Poetry rhymes, a song our souls need to nourish upon. Poetry is a drum, a sound our bodies wish to have. Poetry is organized, a reading our eyes wish to view. Poetry is refined, a structure our moral selves seek. Poetry is civil, instigating the worl...
She had that look a child has only a few times in its life, when the child has bettered her betters. The expression isn't smug, though adults often take it for smugness. It's something else. Maybe relief at having confirmed through personal experienc...
A poem must be authentic. It could be flowery, it could have the most brilliant metaphor, it could be bursting with onomatopoeia and alliteration, assonance and consonance, hyperbole and paradox, from every end, it could have daring syntax and clever...
I can describe an axe entering a human skull in great explicit detail and no one will blink twice at it. I provide a similar description, just as detailed, of a penis entering a vagina, and I get letters about it and people swearing off. To my mind t...
This isn't to deny that there were fierce arguments, at the time and ever since, about the causes and goals of both the Civil War and the Second World War. But 1861 and 1941 each created a common national narrative (which happened to be the victors' ...
I hated [the commercial art studio] because advertising is telling lies, basically, making crap goods look terrific, and I felt I was so privileged to be an artist anyway, why was I prostituting myself on doing this sort of rubbish? So when I left th...
It is difficult to exaggerate the adverse influence of the precepts and practices of religion upon the status and happiness of woman. Owing to the fact that upon women devolves the burden of motherhood, with all its accompanying disabilities, they al...
But I don't want "good" and I don't want "good enough" I want "can't sleep, can't breathe without your love" Front porch and one more kiss, it doesn't make sense to anybody else Who cares if you're all I think about, I've searched the world and I kno...
Yet velvet curtains, soft cheese, compelling work and boys who can run full-tilt—it isn't enough. And if it isn't, it isn't. There's no living with that. The world is made from our imagination; our eyes enliven it, as our hands give it shape. Wanti...
An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation. No man can learn to reason and appraise from a mere peru...
people have been made fun of for too long, not because there is anything wrong with them, it's just the people, i have been bullied everyday, people speaking things that aren't even true about me when i turn my back, stop please, i have my rights, i'...
The scene is most beautiful without people in it. People just screw things up. Forget the whole thing, the world, all the living people, I tell myself, and it has a ring of truth to it. The dead are better, aren't they? The dead don't betray or harm....
False humility is a form of psychosis which was imprinted on most of us since birth. It is a mental illness because it locks us in a victim state of keeping our light turned down, denying who we really are and silently begging for permission to simpl...
I wanted to know what it was like to be a drug addict, and have an eating disorder, and have a loved one die, and fall in love. I saw my friends going through these things, I saw the world going through these things, and I needed to understand them. ...
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...
I have noticed more than once in life that a taste for the ineffably twee can go hand-in-hand with a distinctly uncharitable outlook on the world, I once shared an office with a woman who had covered the wall space behind her desk with pictures of fl...
Nowadays… deals are transactional rather than personal. Instead of placing your faith in a person, you get lawyers to write safeguards into the contract. This is an historic shift from a trust economy to a risk economy. But trust is not a dispensab...
Many lessons can be learned from the history of Western civilization, but one of them is especially clear. Lack of involvement in the affairs of one's society can lead to a sense of powerlessness. In an age that is often crisis-laden and chaotic, an ...
Human stories are practically always about one thing, really, aren't they? Death. The inevitability of death. . . . . . (quoting an obituary) 'There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that ever happens to man is natural, since his presence ...
