Who'll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.
Heade’s calm is unsteady, storm-stirred; we respond in our era to its hint of the nervous and the fearful. His weather is interior weather, in a sense, and he perhaps was, if far from the first to por...
Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
The river, tonally, does not recede, presenting the same lifeless grey near and far, a depthless plane upon which Schmitt’s dragging oars inscribe parallel lines and Eakins’ oars, rising and falling,...
Growth is betrayal.
The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an ath...
Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.
The faith in an afterlife, however much our reason ridicules it, very modestly extends our faith that each moment of our consciousness will be followed by another - that a coherent matrix has been pre...
But cities aren’t like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.
Nevertheless, we react to one a bit differently than we do to Rothko’s hovering panels or Barnett Newman’s stripes, though Whistler does approach their extremity of abstraction; part of our pleasure l...
The assurance from the dictionary had melted in the night.
Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where w...
Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.
Sun and moon, sun and moon, time goes.
She has opened the door of the square cave where the cake of ice sits; and there it is, inches from Harry’s eyes, lopsided from melting but still big, holding within its metal-black bulk the white par...
That's the genius of the capitalist system: Either you're rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be.
This got him to the door. There, ridiculously, he turned. It was only at the door, he decided in retrospect, that her conduct was quite in excusable: not only did she stand unncessarily close, but, by...
You can go to the dark side of the moon and back and see nothing more wonderful and strange than the way men and women manage to get together.
I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded ou...
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