Metonymy into dinner-party chat back at London beach. I
I am still moved by passages of Marx: the 'Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,' for example, where, after the famous line about religion being 'the opium of the people,' he goes on to call it 'th...
Rarely understanding how much shopkeepers and waiters were charging him, he paid for everything with fifty-or hundred-franc notes and came home with sagging pockets of change.
Photographers sometimes take pictures of each other; occasionally they take pictures of each other at work; more usually they take photographs - or versions - of each other's work. Consciously or not...
The person doing the learning is the person writing the book as much as the person reading it.
Part of jazz is the illusion of spontaneity and Monk played the piano as though he’d never seen one before.
Although I was as zealous in my anti-faith as Paul was in his belief I would be lying if I did not confess to a slight chink in my armour of nonbelief.
My greatest urge in life is to do nothing. It's not even an absence of motivation, a lack, for I do have a strong urge: to do nothing. To down tools, to stop. Except I know that if I do that I will fa...
Most people don't want what they want: people love to be prevented, restricted. The hamster not only loves his cage, he'd be lost without it.
Most of all, he loved Celia Johnson, her hats,her face,her cracked porcelain voice: 'This can't last. This misery can't last.Nothing lasts really,neither happiness nor despair.Not even life lasts long...
The lesson of travel seems to be so banal, but so great, which is that people are just so amazingly decent the world over. Given the disparity of income and wealth, it's amazing not just that you don'...
Maybe all exiles are drawn to the sea, the ocean. There is an inherent music in the working sounds of docks and harbors and there were times when he thought that all the melancholy beauty of the blues...
I’ve always been intimidated by gyms, have never been able to enjoy the towel-round-the-shoulder confidence of somebody who knows he can bench-press 250 pounds, or even knows what that means or how mu...
It was so hot we spent our waking hours dozing and our sleeping hours lying awake, trying to sleep.
It was impossible to say where one gesture ended and the next began.
I think I got into travelling because it was so not in my blood, so against my tendency to just stay put because my dad just hated going on holidays, because, as I've said in many essays, the thing th...
It occurred to Jeff that he had entered the vague phase of his life. He had a vague idea of things, a vague sense of what was happening in the world, a vague sense of having meant someone before. It w...
In Dillard it's the comedy of rapture. Or at least it's a comedy that permits prose and thought to soar while inoculating the rapturous against the three ills of which nature writers should live in pe...
Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.
If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, it piques your interest, and if you make it even longer, a new quality emerges, a special intensit...
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