...you seemed to be listening to me, not to find out useful information, but to try to catch me in a logical fallacy. This tells us all that you are used to being smarter than your teachers, and that you listen to them in order to catch them making m...
Often we feel that love results from others caring or providing for us, but our deepest emotional ties usually result from our investment in others. When someone says they’ve quit loving another, I often sense that the lack of love results from fai...
There it was before her - life. Life: she thought but she did not finish her thought. She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband. ...
I think maybe, when I was very young, I witnessed a chaste cheek kiss between the two when it was impossible to avoid. Christmas, birthdays. Dry lips. On their best married days, their communications were entirely transactional: 'We're out of milk ag...
Janet Malcolm had famously described journalism as the art of seduction and betrayal. Any reporter who didn't see journalism as "morally indefensible" was either "too stupid" or "too full of himself," she wrote. I disagreed. Without shutting the door...
Soul is not even that Crackerjack prize that God and Satan scuffle over after the worms have all licked our bones. That's why, when we ponder--as sooner or later each of us must--exactly what we ought to be doing about our soul, religion is the wrong...
Money, dished out in quantities fitting the context, is a social lubricant here. It eases passage even as it maintains hierarchies. Fifty naira for the man who helps you back out from the parking spot, two hundred naira for the police officer who sto...
Ace Speck: [as Dr. Schultz questions Django] Hey! Stop talking to him like that. Dr. King Schultz: [looks to Ace] Like what? Ace Speck: Like that. Dr. King Schultz: My dear sir, I am simply trying to ascertain... Ace Speck: Speak English, goddamn it....
[Slughorn is snipping tentacular leaves through a window in the greenhouse; Harry, who is walking by, notices Slughorn and walks up behind him. Slughorn is startled] Horace Slughorn: Aaauughh!... Merlin's beard, Harry! Harry Potter: Oh, sorry, sir, I...
We've also evolved the ability to simply 'pay it forward': I help you, somebody else will help me. I remember hearing a parable when I was younger, about a father who lifts his young son onto his back to carry him across a flooding river. 'When I am ...
