What happens when you win?When your enemies are at your mercy: how will you act then? Compromise is the temptation of the weak; this is the test for the strong.
We, the living, must find what space we can alongside them; the giant dead whom we cannot tie down, though we grasp at their hair, though we rope them while they sleep
We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, mo...
Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and it spirited you away into fairylands where yo...
There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives...
The city of Jahilia is built entirely of sand, its structures formed of the desert whence it rises. It is a sight to wonder at: walled, four-gated, the whole of it a miracle worked by its citizens, wh...
Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.
In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged.
In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged. Just as we are created anew by what we love, so we are reduced and unmade by what we hate.
In my stolen photographs -- for the photographer must be a thief, he must steal instants of other people's time to make his own tiny eternities -- it was this intimacy I sought, hte closeness of the l...
I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anyt...
Human life was rarely shapely, only intermittently meaningful, its clumsiness the inevitable consequence of the victory of content over form, of what and when over how and why.
Human beings have a remarkable talent for persuading themselves of the authenticity and nobility of aspects of themselves which are in fact expedient, spurious, base.
History is natural selection. Mutant versions of the past struggle for dominance; new species of fact arise,and old, saurian truths go to the wall, blindfolded and smoking last cigarettes. Only the mu...
Get thee behind me, Satan. Seek not come between a lover and his love.
Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unf...
Easily found, easily gathered, lives were the small change of this world, and if you lost a few, it didn't matter; there were always more.
Beware the man (or jinni) of action when he finally seeks to better himself with thought. A little thinking is a dangerous thing.
Believe in your own eyes and you'll get into a lot of trouble, hot water, a mess.
A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.