The liver of the bear is poisonous – the only part of any quadruped known to be so.
The history that happens underneath our noses ought to be the clearest, and yet it’s the most deliquescent. We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn’t...
Work would be something I jogged along with; love would be my life.
Why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary p...
Why should anything happen when everything has happened?
The truth was that nobody ever arrived without invitation, and all that tidying and wiping was performed out of what struck me as deep social atavism
The few psychiatrists I respect always talk about people being mad. Use the short, simple, true words... Mad has the right sound to it. It's an ordinary word, a word which tells us how lunacy might co...
That’s one of the things about life. We’re all just looking for a place of safety. And if you don’t find one, then you have to learn how to pass the time
Se había imaginado que, en el mundo moderno, el tiempo y el lugar ya no eran importantes en las historias de amor. Al mirar atrás vio que habían desempeñado en la suya una función más grande de lo que...
Naturally, she had enemies. Her success, her sex, her racial origin and her bohemian extravagance reminded the puritanical why actors used to be buried in unhallowed ground. And over the decades her a...
Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all.
Miss Fergusson had maintained, when they first stood before the haloed mountain, that there were two explanations of everything, that each required the exercise of faith, and that we had been given fr...
Major General Anders later reflected: I think it was the Earthrise that really kind of got everybody in the solar plexus … We were looking back at our planet, the place where we evolved. Our Earth was...
Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don’t you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business. Also, when you are you...
It seemed...that intelligence wasn't as pure and unalterable a characteristic as people believed. Being intelligent was like being good: you could be virtuous in one person's company and yet wicked in...
It had all begun, very precisely, he told his mind, on the morning of the 28th of January 1936, at Arkhangelsk railway station. No, his mind responded, nothing begins just like that, on a certain date...
If you saved yourself, you might also save those around you, those you loved. And since you would do anything in the world to save those you loved, you did anything in the world to save yourself. And...
If novelists truly wanted to simulate the delta of lfe's possibilities, this is what they'd do. At the back of the book would be a set of sealed envelopes in various colours. Each would be clearly mar...
I've been turning over in my mind the question of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it. I certainly don't get soggy at the memory of some childhood knickknack; nor do I want to deceive myself senti...
I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.