I’m not arguing here that women and children don’t lie. Men, women, and children lie, but the latter two are not disproportionately prone to doing so, and men—a category that includes used-car salesme...
In the same way, teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you.
Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street.
In contemporary parlance, sex is biological and gender is socially constructed.
To tell a story is always to translate the raw material into a specific shape, to select out of the boundless potential facts those that seem salient.
Violence is the power of the state; imagination and non-violence the power of civil society.
People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.
[Thoreau's] famous night in jail took place about halfway through his stay in the cabin on Emerson's woodlot at Walden Pond. His two-year stint in the small cabin he built himself is often portrayed a...
Explorers, the historian Aaron Sachs wrote me in answer to a question, ‘were always lost, because they’d never been to these places before. They never expected to know exactly where they were. Yet, at...
Fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already loss.
Space--as landscape, terrain, spectacle, experience--has vanished.
Paint in several colors was squeezed out of tubes and mixed and applied to woven fabric stretched on a wooden frame so artfully we say we see a woman hanging out a sheet rather than oil on canvas. Ana...
Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.
Think of how much more time and energy we would have to focus on other things that matter if we weren’t so busy surviving.
For a while it was forever, and then things started to fall apart. There isn't a story to tell, because a relationship is a story you construct together and take up residence in, a story as sheltering...
Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible. Perfectionists can find fault with anything, and no one has higher standards in this regard than leftists.
Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are wh...
I wrote it in one sitting early the next morning. When something assembles itself that fast, it's clear it's been composing itself somewhere in the unknowable back of the mind for a long time. It want...
I grew up with landscape as a recourse, with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit. Vast open spaces speak...
It is in the nature of things to be lost and not otherwise. Think of how little has been salvaged from the compost of time of the hundreds of billions of dreams dreamt since the language to describe t...
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