exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is tru...
Van was feeding Christian as we walked in the door. I shielded my hands in front of my face to prevent from seeing her bare breast. "God damn woman, put that tit away!" "I'm feeding my daughter. You want another taste?" I started gagging immediately ...
When we discuss a novel it is only partially to hear another person's 'view', it is much more to find out what we ourselves think in order to possess the text more completely. Such a possession is then a composite one, it is the book itself and the a...
Today more than ever before, its time to go through with life. Stop thinking so hard about what it is that you want to do. Go out and conquer your dreams! Only you can walk your path. Remember that inner voice and use it to drive yourself straight to...
While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come...
Actually, time had always been passing. I had just managed to avoid thinking about it very much. It would be hard for me to recapture that feeling—life wasn’t so easy anymore. Small things pricked my heart. In those early days, I lived in a world...
Pamela Geiger is Kalist’s secretary and she’s forty-five, lean and tanned, but more attractive from behind than in front, according to sexist Pissec, who thinks his own wit is as sharp as a hawk’s beak. He sees a beagle sniff her leg, just belo...
I find that daydreams are oftentimes similar in this respect to real dreams, the kind we experience in an unconscious state. Our mind puts together scenic imagery and simulated interactions in a seemingly designless, irregular, and often circuitous m...
Think about it. People in the sixteenth century - not to mention in Jesus's time - didn't look like this: perfect skin, perfect hairdos, spotless clothes. These are people who went to the bathroom in the street, for God's sake. There's no way they lo...
(When asked “Was the model for Midori (a character in Norwegian Wood) modeled after your wife?”) I showed your message to my wife. She got mad and yelled: “What would make them think I was the model for Midori?!” She told me to fix the misund...
I believe we write our own stories. And each time we think we know the end - we don't. Perhaps luck exists somewhere between the world of planning, the world of chance, and in peace that comes from knowing that you just can't know it all. You know, l...
i think through it all, the hardest part was un-attaching myself to the ones I thought would stay around forever. People change and life changes with it, you've got to fight like mad for everything you love and let go with ease for everything that is...
Certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideoologues, dogmatists, and bullies--people who think that their rigtness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does n...
When, after hours of lovemaking, we quickly dressed and left the apartment, I sometimes thought that Füsun was also taking care not to get “carried away” by her feelings for me. A proper understanding of my story depends, I think, on a full appr...
Dreadful will be the day when the world becomes contented, when one great universal satisfaction spreads itself over the world. Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts ...
Islam is a beautiful faith for it stresses the need to apply intelligence, commands deeper thinking and encourages Muslims to engage with meaningful activities for self-renewal. Islam is faith that looks into the core of human existence through the p...
How could the human mind progress, while tormented with frightful phantoms, and guided by men, interested in perpetuating its ignorance and fears? Man has been forced to vegetate in his primitive stupidity: he has been taught stories about invisible ...
It's only young people who make giant, life-altering decisions based on what other people might think, and it's because they don't see their own death looming. Their fear is, "Will my family, friends and lovers admire me?" whereas an older person's f...
The philosopher Sir James Mackintosh had said that the powers of a man's mind were proportionate to the quantity of coffee he drank, and Voltaire had knocked back fifty cups of it a day, so Ianto reckoned there had to be something in it. And saving C...
It’s not just tougher out there. It’s become a situation where the contest is how much you can destroy the system, rather than how much you can make it work. It makes no difference if you have a ‘D’ or an ‘R’ after your name. There’s no...
Humankind, which discovers its capacity to transform and in a certain sense create the world through its own work, forgets that this is always based on God's prior and original gift of things that are. People think that they can make arbitrary use of...
