Committing suicide essentially said to friends and loved ones and the world at large that you were the only thing that mattered, that your problems were hopeless that you deserved to escape from them and to hell with everyone else. Suicide was nothin...
Recall what used to be the theme of poetry in the romantic era. In neat verses the poet lets us share his private, bourgeois emotions: his sufferings great and small, his nostalgias, his religious or political pre-occupations, and, if he were English...
There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book. In adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style...
The curious fact is that biology tells us nothing about desire. And, when you think about it, culture -- novels, movies, opera, and quite a lot of painting -- is about desire, how we manage desire, how we suffer from it, and how it brings us joy when...
We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization - black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, ...
I am a Dalit in Khairlanji. A Pandit in the Kashmir valley. A Sikh in 1984. I am from the North East of India when I am in Munirka. I am a Muslim in Gujarat; a Christian in Kandhamal. A Bihari in Maharashtra. A Delhi-wallah in Chennai. A woman in Nor...
A writer’s life is half ambition and half anxiety, and there has to be both. It is no good writing a novel and feeling fine, and it is no good writing a whole novel feeling miserable. It has to be both, that mixture of anxiety and ambition, and you...
...But if we are to say anything important, if fiction is to stay relevant and vibrant, then we have to ask the right questions. All art fails if it is asked to be representative—the purpose of fiction is not to replace life anymore than it is mean...
A writer can live by his writing. If not so luxuriously as by other trades, then less luxuriously. The nature of the work he does all day will more affect his happiness than the quality of his dinner at night. Whatever be your calling, and however mu...
The most beautiful women in the world are the ones that can stand as rivals on the battlefield of love, yet they can still see each other’s pain. They can set down their swords for only just a moment to acknowledge the beauty of the warrior that st...
But now, our daily monkeyshines are such, our preoccupations are so low, our language has be come so debased, the words so blunted and damaged, we've said such stupid and dull things, the the higher beings hear only babbling and grunting and TV comme...
~Remember this always: Your body and mind can be broken, but your Spirit, is unbreakable, and unchangeable~ When we talk about people or circumstances breaking our spirit, what we mean is that a person has been affected emotionally to the point of fe...
In foreign policy, a modest acceptance of fate will often lead to discipline rather than indifference. The realization that we cannot always have our way is the basis of a mature outlook that rests on an ancient sensibility, for tragedy is not the tr...
Just because something is addictive doesn't mean that you will get addicted to it. But . . . if your stomach ties up in knots while you count the seconds waiting for a phone call from that special someone . . . if you hear a loud buzzing in your ears...
A large class of readers … will suffer greatly from the introduction into the pages of this work of words printed with all their letters, which it has become the custom to represent by the initial and final letter only—a blank line filling the in...
The American critic Dale Peck, author of Hatchet Jobs (2004), argues that reviewing finds its true character in critical GBH such as Fischer's [review of Martin Amis's Yellow Dog]. It represents a return to the prehistoric origins of reviewing in Zoi...
Obviously, the choice between human selfishness and divine Selfishness is not about leaving or not leaving a relationship. More important are the day-to-day opportunities in the course of relationship. It is really the choice of living from the heart...
The temptation is to make an idol of our own experience, to assume our pain is more singular than it is. Experience means nothing if it does not mean beyond itself: we mean nothing unless and until our hard-won meanings are internalized and catalyzed...
Where has God promised to fulfill our every whim according to the minutia of our earthly desires? Where has He promised to keep us from suffering or disappointment? Things He did not spare His own Son? You were raised in one of the finest manors in t...
Madame D.: Come with me. M. Gustave: To... fucking Lutz? Madame D.: Please! M. Gustave: Give me your hand. You've nothing to fear. You're always anxious before you travel. I admit you appear to be suffering a more acute attack on this occasion, but t...
School Principal: You can kiss Eden goodbye! Trouble awaits you... [points to Sophie] School Principal: You, my dear, in pain shall you bring forth children, wear high heels, suffer through dieting, exfoliation, face-lifts, and what's more, you'll ha...
