Offered a job as book critic for magazine as a young man, Bellow had been interviewed by Chambers and asked to give his opinion about William Wordsworth. Replying perhaps too quickly that Wordsworth had been a Romantic poet, he had been brusquely inf...
It frightens me that I can't do anything sensible about it." "Are you scared that you'll wind up with a boring job where you have to see the same people every day and drink instant coffee?" "I'm more scared that I'll forget the feeling I have now." "...
You can't tell that the coffin holds the body of a boy. He wasn't even sixteen but his coffin's the same size as a man's would be. It's not just that he was young, but because it was so sudden. No one should die the way he did; that's what the faces ...
Camus-boy, you're always going to be the same you, just older. It's not like there's a moment when you wake up and go, ' I don't tell him, but this is the scariest fucking thing I've ever heard in my life. Being grown-up feel like a big transition. I...
Some people may think that it is a dangerous attitude to take toward the Bible, to pick and choose what you want to accept and throw everything else out. My view is that everyone already picks and chooses what they want to accept in the Bible...I hav...
I am a lonely man," he said again that evening. "And is it not possible that you are also a lonely person? But I am an older man, and I can live with my loneliness, quietly. You are young, and it must be difficult to accept your loneliness. You must ...
Slim is queer and though Nelson isn't supposed to mind that he does. He also minds that there are a couple of slick blacks making it at the party and that one little white girl with that grayish kind of sharp-chinned Polack face from the south side o...
So you are tired of your life, young man! All the more reason have you to live. Anyone can die. A murderer has moral force enough to jeer at his hangman. It is very easy to draw the last breath. It can be accomplished successfully by a child or a war...
Come, my child," I said, trying to lead her away. "Wish good-bye to the poor hare, and come and look for blackberries." "Good-bye, poor hare!" Sylvie obediently repeated, looking over her shoulder at it as we turned away. And then, all in a moment, h...
When I was extremely young and shockingly stupid, I thought you weren't supposed to ever get angry at anybody you cared about (lest you suspect I'm exaggerating the "shockingly stupid" part, I also thought Mount Rushmore was a natural phenomenon). I ...
So. If this was some normal fictional young-adult book, this is the part of the story where after the film, the entire high school would rise to their feet and applaud, and Earl and I would find True Acceptance and begin to Truly Believe in Ourselves...
Do you realize,' Dr. Ramzi says, smiling broadly, 'when you speak of a political programme, that your programme now is the same that Mahmoud Sami Al-Baroudi's government tried to establish more than a hundred years ago?' 'Is that right?' Isabel says....
She looked... She looked young, and- and--" I glanced down at Rossana gazing up at me, lips parted, eyes shining, her hair loose around her shoulders, and the next words I spoke were intended with no artifice at all. "She is almost as beautiful as yo...
Well,’said Ernest, ‘by some strange coincidence I know this story.’ Boddichek was not good at irony. ‘I knew that there was that possibility,’ he said, ‘but we have a great new way to treat it, and I thought you might want to reread it be...
Finally, let me share a feeling of mine, I hope it will not be misinterpreted as pride. I am seventy four now. But still, if they give me a duty in the wooden hut where I used to stay when I was a mentor long years ago, I will gladly run there and tr...
There are extremes within any population, but on average, at least among young adults, those who feel lonely actually spend no more time alone than do those who feel more connected. They are no more or less physically attractive than average, and the...
To Polyakov it was as though a fierce wind from downstream was sweeping up the Volga. Several times he was knocked off his feet; he fell to the ground no longer knowing what world he lived in, whether he was old or young, what was up and what was dow...
I think about something I once heard on the radio. About Abraham and Isaac." "I was afraid you'd say something like that." "You asked." "So what about them? I don't really know much about that kind of stuff." "There was a pastor on the radio who said...
You could lose the ones you loved in the blink of an eye—and he was willing to bet, when it happened, you weren’t thinking about all the reasons that could have kept you apart. You thought of all the reasons that kept you together. And, no doubt,...
Self-development is a way of Life. Our Self-Development never ends. We are never too young or too old for personal growth. We have an amazing potential to reach our highest potential, to have truly inspiring careers and loving relationships. Unfortun...
I thought once how Theocritus had sung Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years, Who each one in a gracious hand appears To bear a gift for mortals, old or young; And, as I mused it in his antique tongue, I saw, in gradual vision through my ...
