Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. Once of the pleasures of reading is s...
One of my luckiest instincts lay in being able to tell when I was happy— at the time, not afterwards. Most people don’t realize until long afterwards that they have passed through a period of happines...
KIAJIAN
I had cooperated. I could not have refused. I was smitten with her, half in love but also afraid, because in my life (and she seemed to know this) I had not loved anyone without having been wounded. L...
How nice it would be, I thought, if someone reading the narrative of my African trip felt the same, that it was the next best thing to being there
Faulkner first spoke about the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the hypocrisy of boasting of our values to our enemies after we have taught them (as we are now doing) that when we talk of freedom and liber...
And father said I never wanted this. I'm sick of everyone pretending to be old Dan Beavers in his L. L. Bean moccasins, and his Dubbelwares, and his Japanese bucksaw -- all these fake frontiersmen wit...
She looked a hundred years older, as stale and ruined as yesterday's oatmeal.
I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees.
Last days? Don't they know? These are the traits of all days, every day, everywhere.
Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
The moment that changed me for ever was the moment my first child was born. I was happy, filled with hope, and thought, 'Now I understand the whole point of work, of life, of love.'
The train was sunlit and emptier.
One thinks one is going to the tropics and one finds oneself in the Chinese version of Welwyn Garden City.
I was shown each second passing as the train belted along, ticking off the buildings with a speed that made me melancholy.
A British traveler remarked, 'There are [fashions in Guatemala] which it would require more than common charity to speak of with respect...' FILL IN YOUR OWN GRIPES! ;-)
I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, and that if you describe precisely what you see and give it life with your imagination, then what you write ought to have lasting value, no matter what...
I was raised in a large family. The first reason for my travel was to get away from my family. I knew that I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't want people to ask me questions about it.
Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.
The religious belief varies from village to village. Nearly all worship the cholera and smallpox deities, and there are traces of serpent worship.