Remember the Hottentots?" asked James. "They've become the Khoi now, which means that the Germans will have to retire that wonderful word of theirs, Hottentotenpotentatenstantenattentater, which means, as you know, one who attacks the aunt of a Hotte...
I wore a groove in the kitchen floor with endless trips to the fridge, hoping against hope that I had somehow missed a plateful of cold sausages on the previous 4,000 excursions. Then, for no obvious reason, I decided to buy a footstool.
Life," Garp wrote, "is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.
tiny: but there is the word, this word phil wrayson taught me once: weltschmerz. it's the depression you feel when the world as it is does not line up with the world as you think it should be. i live in a big goddamned weltzschermz ocean, you know? a...
Not until the creation and maintenance of decent conditions of life for all people are recognized and accepted as a common obligation of all people and all countries - not until then shall we, with a certain degree of justification, be able to speak ...
I have realized that whatever good comes to me, comes from God, whatever bad comes to me, God has allowed it, and I choose to be thankful for both.
No one alive today has a single ancestor in his or her past who died in infancy. We are the champions, my friend!
Sophie and Agatha locked eyes one last time but neither screamed for the other. Once true loves, the two girls now pulled apart like strangers, each in the arms of a boy, Good with Good, Evil with Evil... Both of their wishes granted.
Yesterday I was clever, That is why I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, That is why I am changing myself.
It's not the honors and the prizes and the fancy outsides of life that ultimately nourish our souls. It's the knowing that we can be trusted, that we never have to fear the truth, that the bedrock of our very being is firm.
I walked out and breathed fresh air. I felt the sun on my skin. The world is a different place when you are well, when you are young. The world is beautiful and safe. I said hello to the gatekeeper. He said hello back to me.
This town, this country, this world, is full to the brim with clever people, and just look at it. Never been in such awful shape. Clever people don't give a damn about anybody but themselves. Too busy being clever. The world doesn't need anymore clev...
I am not important. If I take a break, no one dies. And this is A Good Thing.
We create the world we live in. If we want to change what we don't like in the world, we must start by changing what we don't like about ourselves.
When I decide who to vote for as president, I ask myself who will be best for America and for the world. An important component of my answer involves my assessment of the candidate's willingness and ability to protect Israel's security, since I stron...
In the 2013 Economists Program, we hired 51 percent women, 49 percent men. And the reason for that is that we have a draft from all over the world, and we've hired, for instance, in that group, a good number of Chinese economists - highly qualified, ...
Post-human intelligence will develop hypercomputers with the processing power to simulate living things - even entire worlds. Perhaps advanced beings could use hypercomputers to surpass the best 'special effects' in movies or computer games so vastly...
Let your mind see every detail of your own special version of the very best that life can be. If you could make the world exactly to your liking, consider very specifically just how that world would be. If you could spend your time doing precisely wh...
I was born subject like others to errors and defects, But never to the error of wanting to understand too much, Never to the error of wanting to understand only with the intellect.. Never to the defect of demanding of the World That it be anything th...
And if Germans do have systematic minds, this is just as likely to be because their exceedingly erratic mother tongue has exhausted their brains' capacity to cope with any further irregularity
The sky was almost black and then it started hailing. It was so beautiful and scary, I wondered about the science of storms and how sometimes it seemed that a storm wanted to break the world and how the world refused to break.
