For suddenly it had changed into that gear when time is slower - as when, falling off a ladder, one has time to think: I shall land so, just there, and I must turn in the air slightly... All this in a...
A hundred years of scholarly thinking has stretched back a million-fold the age of the Earth. But these same diviners, antiquarians and scholars are thinking now as they did a hundred years ago, when...
I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.
[I wrote] '...letters designed to hide behind.
Yes. Laugh. But there’s sense in the old rules. They kept people out of trouble.’ He was annoyed because I laughed, and said that a woman in my position needed extra dignity of behaviour. ‘What positi...
While she strode rapidly through the ward to the door at the other end, she was able to see that every bed or cot held an infant or a small child in whom the human template had been wrenched out of pa...
We had a kind of pity for each other; we were both afflicted permanently with a feeling of sad helplessness because we were unable to make each other happy in this way. But nothing stopped us from cho...
They have not yet evolved into an understanding of their individual selves as merely parts of a whole, first of all humanity, their own species, let alone achieving a conscious knowledge of humanity a...
The world is only tolerable because of the empty places in it...when the world's filled up, we'll have to get hold of a star. Any star. Venus, or Mars. Get hold of it and leave it empty. Man needs an...
The thought [behind the Golden Notebook] was that to divide off and compartmentalize living was dangerous and led to nothing but trouble. Old, young, black, white, men, women, capitalism, socialism: t...
The human being is given by Nature little more energy than what is needed to maintain the species; to reproduce and to live out our (very short) spans. But if we want to be fit for the journey up and...
Sometimes I dislike women, I dislike us all, because of our capacity for not-thinking when it suits us; we choose not to think when we are reaching our for happiness.
She brought herself to decide she would make an effort to renew that friendship with the Cohens, for there was no one else who could help her. She wanted them to tell her what she must read. For there...
Her source of self respect was that she had not - as she put it - given up and crawled into safety somewhere. Into a safe marriage.
For with my intuition I knew that this man was repeating a pattern over and over again: courting a woman with his intelligence and sympathy, claiming her emotionally; then, when she began to claim in...
For she was suffering that misery peculiar to the young, that they are going to be cheated by circumstances out of the full life every nerve and instinct is clamouring for.
Es terrible destruir la imagen que una persona tiene de sí misma en aras de la verdad o cualquier otra abstracción. ¿Cómo saber si será capaz de crear otra que le permita seguir viviendo?
But when you get down to it, it’s all a lie. You sit here writing and writing, but no one can see it—that’s arrogant, I told you so before. And you aren’t even honest enough to let yourself be what yo...
And when the dark comes, he will look up and out and see a little smudge of light that is a galaxy that exploded millions of years ago, and the oppression that had gripped his heart lifts, and he laug...
Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/sh...