It is untrue that fiction is nonutilitarian. The uses of fiction are synonymous with the uses of literature. They include refreshment, clarification of life, self-awareness, expansion of our range of experiences, and enlargement of our sense of under...
But I am inclined to think a Christian would be wise to avoid, where he decently can, any meeting with people who are bullies, lascivious, cruel, dishonest, spiteful and so forth. Not because we are "too good" for them. In a sense because we are not ...
Nobody can understand the greatness of the thirteenth century, who does not realize that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really bolder and freer than what we call the renaissance, which was a resur...
The bookshop felt damp and chilly, but it was still and unsupervised bookshop, and Anna felt a frisson of excitement as she scanned the shelves with greedy eyes. Libraries weren't quite the same, she'd found; something about the prosaic smell of othe...
There are landscapes in which we feel above us not sky but space. Something larger, deeper than sky is sensed, is seen, although in such settings the sky itself is invariably immense. There is a place between the cerebrum and the stars where sky stop...
Some people's glasses are half full. I'm the one drinking them. Some people have forgotten that Pluto is still a planet. I still remember my childhood. Some people are vegans. I have common sense. Some people call me Maurice. Some people call me the ...
I sensed he may have occasionally strayed in some of his past relationships. It was something I felt but ignored, a rent in the fabric of an otherwise splendid garment I thought I could mend. I thought I could live with it—I thought, yes and I admi...
He challenged the world with his genius, and the world defeated him by ignoring the challenge and starving him. He stopped writing because he had failed and because he had no choice but to accept the world’s terms: there is no mystery here. This wa...
... They paid some madman who thought he was a decorator a lot of money to make the place look hip and unique. May be it's my lack of fashion sense talking, but I thought they should have held out for one of those gorillas who has learned to paint. T...
In a society of increasingly mass-produced, assembly-line entertainment, where every individual is treated like an empty pitcher to be filled from above, jazz retains something of the spirit of the handicrafts of yesteryear. The print of the human sp...
It's just nice, I guess. Knowing that someone else can put into words what I feel. That there are people who have been through things worse than I have, and they come out on the other side okay. Not only that, but they made some kind of twisted, fuck...
At best he read popular science magazines like the Scientific American he had now, to keep himself up-to-date, in layman's terms, with physics generally. But even then his concentration was marred, for a lifetime's habit made him inconveniently watch...
No critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language's capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility. For English is a language that simply cannot be fixed, not can its use ...
I was just thoughts, just air. There was nothingness all around me. Was this what it was like to be dead? When you died, did you still sense everything going on around you, only it was happening so far away that you didn't care about it? You were flo...
In the war, to survive, you had to be responsible every minute of every day, unhesitatingly responsible for yourself, for your every action. You had to be responsible for your buddies, too, because survival wasn't something that could be achieved alo...
Over and over again in the study of the history of life it appears that what can happen does happen. There is little suggestion that what occurs must occur, that it was fated or that it follows some fixed plan, except simply as the expansion of life ...
The discipline gave me a sense of achievement. Not least, fasting is a test of willpower and, whenever I felt my willpower weakening, I would tell myself that I could eat as much as I wanted after sunset. But then the strange thing was that after fas...
The body, the mind, and the spirit don't form a pyramid, they form a circle. Each of them runs into the other two. The body isn't below the mind and the spirit; from the point of view it's between them. if you reside too much in the mind, then you ge...
...in response to whatever Alice was struggling with, whatever had caused her to withdraw from him, he had chosen the arms of another woman instead of relying on his own fortitude, as if he'd somehow deserved more comfort than Alice herself had been ...
Taqwā means to protect oneself against the harmful or evil consequences of one's conduct. If, then, by "fear of God" one means fear of the consequences of one's actions—whether in this world or the next (fear of punishment of the Last Day)—one i...
For action, whatever its immediate purpose, also implies relief at doing something, anything, and the joy of exertion. This is the optimism that is inherent in, and proper and indispensable to action, for without it nothing would ever be undertaken. ...
