You realize how sympathy and antagonism can coexist. You are discovering how many seemingly incompatible emotions can thrive, side by side, in the same human heart.
Tertullian said of Christian belief that it was true because it was impossible. Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.
Love is just a system for getting someone to call you Darling after sex.
He never recorded the writer or the source: he didn't want to be bullied by reputation; truth should stand by itself, clear and unsupported.
A common response in surveys of religious attitudes is to say something like, 'I don't go to church, but I have my own personal idea of God.' This kind of statement makes me in turn react like a philo...
how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life. And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookshop.
You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image...
The present looks back at some great figure of an earlier century and wonders, Was he on our side? Was he a goodie? What a lack of self-confidence this implies: the present wants both to patronise the...
Sarcasm is irony which has lost its soul
Noah couldn’t do anything without first wondering what He would think. Now that’s no way to go on. Always looking over your shoulder for approval – it’s not adult, is it?
Martha was a clever girl, and therefore not a believer.
Margarita mėgdavo sakyti, kad yra dvi rūšys moterų: tos, kurios matomos kiaurai, ir tos, kurios nešioja paslaptį. Ir kad tai yra svarbiausia, ką vyrai išsyk pajunta, ir svarbiausia, kas juos patraukia...
If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony which had lost its soul.
Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everythi...
But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.
Forty's nothing, at fifty you're in your prime, sixty's the new forty, and so on.
In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.
Frangibility
You can put it another way, of course; you always can.
What happened to the truth is not recorded.