To her the strangest thought of all was that she might be extraordinarily appealing. It went against everything she believed in, or at least against everything she wanted to believe in; because, deep...
To have an identity, you have to believe that other identities equally exist. You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets.
There’s the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known. How do you know that you’re a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself.
There was, of course, nowhere better in the world to be than New York City. This fact was the foundation of her family's satisfaction with itself, the platform from which all else could be ridiculed,...
There seemed to be almost nothing left of Lalitha; she was breaking up on him the way dead songbirds did in the wild-they were impossibly light to begin with, and as soon as their little hearts stoppe...
The world was overpopulated with talkers and underpopulated by listeners, and many of her sources gave her the impression that she was the first person who’d ever truly listened to them.
The mark of a legitimate revolution - the scientific, for example - was that it didn't brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred.
The house felt more like a body—softer, more mortal and organic—than like a building
She, for her part, was accustomed to my leavings and didn't complain too much. But she still felt about me what she'd always felt, which was what I wouldn't really feel about her until after she was g...
Kierkegaard, in 'Either/Or,' makes fun of the 'busy man' for whom busyness is a way of avoiding an honest self-reckoning. You might wake up in the middle of the night and realize that you're lonely in...
Katz had read extensively in popular sociobiology, and his understanding of the depressive personality type and its seemingly perverse persistence in the human gene pool was that depression was a succ...
It’s all circling around the same problem of personal liberties, Walter said. People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more...
Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
Ima toliko Džonatana. Prava poplava knjževnih Džonatana. Kad bi čitala Njujork tajms buk rivju, pomislila bi da je to najčešće muško ime u Americi. Sinonim za veličinu i talenat. Za ambiciju i vitalno...
If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is...
I get feminism as an equal-rights issue, he’d said to her once. What I don’t get is the theory. Whether women are supposed to be exactly the same as men, or different and better than men. And he’d lau...
How could I have thought that I needed to cure myself in order to fit into the 'real' world? I didn't need curing, and the world didn't, either; the only thing that did need curing was my understandin...
El sol bajo, en el cielo: luminaria menor, estrella enfriándose. Ráfagas de desorden, sucesivas. Árboles inquietos, temperaturas en descenso,
Don’t talk to me about hatred if you haven’t been married. Only love, only long empathy and identification and compassion, can root another person in your heart so deeply that there’s no escaping your...
Although in general Gary applauded the modern trend toward individual self-management of retirement funds and long-distance calling plans and private-schooling options, he was less than thrilled to be...