Did all friendships—all relations—involve this discreet and mysterious exchange of qualities, this exchange of power?
Chuck functions here as a kind of authenticity fetish, allowing Hans (and the reader) the nostalgic pleasure of returning to a narrative time when symbols and mottoes were full of meaning and novels w...
But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.
But like a lot of people whose vocation it is to change the world he proved to be, in person, outrageously petty.
But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears – dissoluti...
But i cannot be worrying-worrying all the time about the *truth*. I have to worry about the truth that can be *lived with*.
But first the endgames. Because it seems that no matter what you think of them, they must be played, even if, like the independence of India or Jamaica, like the signing of peace treaties or the docki...
But asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form.
Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - it's something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arr...
Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into the language. And the particular magic of homeland, its particular spell over irie, wa...
Archie's marriage felt like buying a pair of shoes, taking them home, and finding they don't fit.
And then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging, it seems some long, dirty lie... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything i...
A peculiar idea. Once you’re alive in this world, you’re responsible. For
A feminist who had always been supported by men—first my father and now the Noted Activist—and who, though she continually harangued me about the nobility of labor, had never, as far as I knew, actual...
A different kind of history from my mother’s, the kind that is barely written down—that is felt.
They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
- I couldn't help but notice the placidity of a small female household. In Tracey's home, disappointment in the man was ancient history: they never really had any hope in him, for he had almost never...
Oh, he loves her; just as the English loved India and Africa and Ireland; it is the love that is the problem, people treat their lovers badly)
Then after a few miles you arrived at a new idea, that wealth and morality are in essence the same thing, for the more money a person had, then the more goodness—or potential for goodness—a person pos...
The object of her passion was only an accessory to the passion itself, a passion that through its long suppression was now asserting itself with volcanic necessity.