An imagined pleasure is never really the pleasure, but an imagined pain, in a very real sense, is the pain, because so much of pain is the consciousness of it. It makes itself objective. Whereas to think about pleasure is to step outside of it; to th...
If we could honestly promise young couples that we knew how to give them offspring with superior character, why should we assume they would decline? Common sense tells us that if scientists find ways to greatly improve human capabilities, there will ...
But I always need to identify with a character to write about him or her - and by 'identify,' I mean see the world through that person's eyes and have a strong sense of the inner logic of their acts and decisions, wacky or wrongheaded though they mig...
The Boss: [after Slevin has just told him he'll take the job killing the Rabbi's son] I knew you had sense. Slevin: Sense is something you have when you have a choice. The Boss: Sometimes. Sometimes it's when you know you don't.
People who volunteer at the recycling center or soup kitchen through a church or neighborhood group can come to feel part of something 'larger.' Such a sense of belonging calls on a different part of a self than the market calls on. The market calls ...
My life isn’t theories and formulae. It’s part instinct, part common sense. Logic is as good a word as any, and I’ve absorbed what logic I have from everything and everyone… from my mother, from training as a ballet dancer, from Vogue magazin...
Victim mentality only creates helplessness, the most maddening, miserable and upsetting of mental states. In fact, it is commonly reported that nothing triggers madness like a sense of helplessness. It is a cousin of paranoia, a sense that the world ...
I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times - and this, I think, is a sense you develop - I can tell that the line wants to continue. If it does, I can feel a sense of ...
My government is in no sense anti-Russian.
I have no sense of time, and I'm a dreamer.
I'm a lapsed Catholic in the best sense of the word.
The thing is, it's really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs--if yours are really ones and theirs aren't. You think if they're intelligent and all, the other person, and have a good sense of humor, that the...
There is no monopoly of common sense On either side of the political fence We share the same biology Regardless of ideology Believe me when I say to you I hope the Russians love their children too [...] There's no such thing as a winnable war It's a ...
Being genius does not necessarily mean knowing it all or having the highest academic qualification; but a persons ability to apply wisdom and common sense to common things in a distinctive manner and courageously, exhibiting the latent deft to the ad...
Regin had known the risk in coming here, but she wasn't fearful. As Lucia had also told her, "Sometimes I don't think you have the sense to be afraid when you should." Regin had interpreted that to mean, "You have no sense of fear, oh, great Reginlei...
We need to bridge our sense of loneliness and disconnection with a sense of community and continuity even if we must manufacture it from our time on the Web and our use of calling cards to connect long distance. We must “log on” somewhere, and if...
Words could betray you if you chose the wrong ones, or mean less if you used too many. Jokes could be grandly miscalculated, or stories deemed boring, and I'd learned early on that my sense of humor and ideas about what sorts of things were fascinati...
The most important thing to remember about confronting an irrational person is that they are usually attributing an inaccurate meaning to a situation causing them to react irrationally.
I had a dream about you. It was raining, and you were anorexic and shaped like an umbrella. We fell in love like a desert has a dry sense of humor. I laughed so hard I got dehydrated and sunburned.
Without imagination, we merely see or hear, and even if we see or hear that the objects of the senses are beautiful, we cannot feel that they are so. The difference is this: in feeling the beauty of objects, we enjoy not only the common, shared pleas...
Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point w...
