“V.S. Pritchett's definition of a short story is 'something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.' Notice the 'glimpse' part of this. First the glimpse. Then the glimpse gives life, turned into something that illuminates the moment and may, if we're lucky -- that word again -- have e...
2025-06-12 13:35:24 +0000 UTC View Post
"The color of one's creed, neckties, eyes, thoughts, manners, speech, is sure to meet somewhere in time of space with a fatal objection from a mob that hates that particular tone. And the more brilliant, the more unusual the man, the nearer he is to the stake. Stranger always rhymes with danger. ...
2025-06-12 13:35:07 +0000 UTC View Post
“In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.”
“It seems to me we're just beginners at love. We say we love each other and we do, I don't doubt it. I love Terri and Terri loves me, and you guys love each other too. You know the kind of love I'm talking about now. Physical love, that impulse that drives you to someone special, as well as lov...
2025-06-11 07:27:01 +0000 UTC View Post
“I haven't learned
How or why
Universe contrived to implode
And intellectually code
The myriadly unique
Chromosomically orchestrated
DNA-RNA,
Quadripartite moleculed,
Binary paired,
Helically extended
And unzippingly dichotomied
Regenerative symphonic
jazz, a...
“I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you're born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous o...
2025-06-10 08:03:20 +0000 UTC View Post
“Droll thing life is--that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself--that comes too late--a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It take...
2025-06-09 09:44:04 +0000 UTC View Post
"The higher animals engage in individual fights, but never in organized masses. Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and with calm pulse to exterminate his kin...
2025-06-09 09:43:49 +0000 UTC View Post
“Everywhere something could be detected that seemed to be on the point of betraying some secret, something elusively subtle oh, how subtle!...'No,' Chichikov said to himself, 'women are a subject such as...' Here he dismissed it with the wave of a hand: 'What's the use of talking!' Just try and...
2025-06-08 09:43:09 +0000 UTC View Post
“Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller's is partly natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or incivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections); obstinacy and a tendency toward churlishne...
2025-06-08 09:42:53 +0000 UTC View Post
“Before I knowed it, I was sayin' out loud, 'The hell with it! There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of the same thing.' . . . . I says, 'What's this call, this sperit?' An' I says, 'It's love. I love people so much I'm fit to bust, sometimes....
2025-06-07 12:10:57 +0000 UTC View Post
“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars...
2025-06-07 12:10:36 +0000 UTC View Post
“God is not made manifest in language, you dope. He’s not manifest in anything. He doesn’t exist.” “Well, I believe in God!” Petrina cut in, outraged. “Have some consideration for me at least, you damn atheist!” “God was a mistake, I’ve long understood there is zero di...
2025-06-06 10:07:09 +0000 UTC View Post
“How can it be so, this hovering sense of being both victim and perpetrator, both us and them, both me and him? Have we been expelled from an arcadia of fun where nature provided us with innocent automata, lowing and braying machines for our amusement?
I doubt it. I doubt it very much. I...
“Perhaps the greatest faculty our minds possess is the ability to cope with pain. Classic thinking teaches us of the four doors of the mind, which everyone moves through according to their need.
First is the door of sleep. Sleep offers us a retreat from the world and all its pain. Sleep mark...
“Poor L.
We are sorry that you left so soon. We are even sorrier to have inveigled our Esmeralda and mermaid into a naughty prank. That sort of game will never again be played with you, firebird. We apollo [apologize]. Remembrance, embers ans membranes of beauty make artists and morons loose...
On page 224 of Liddell Hart's History of World War I you will read that an attack against the Serre-Montauban line by thirteen British divisions (supported by 1,400 artillery pieces), planned for the 24th of July, 1916, had to be postponed until the morning of the 29th. The torrential rains, Capt...
2025-06-04 08:30:21 +0000 UTC View Post
"
‘I am Van Veen — in case you are no longer lucid enough to recognize somebody you have seen only twice. Hospital records put your age at thirty; I thought you were younger, but even so that is a very early age for a person to die — whatever he be tvoyu mat’ — half-baked...
2025-06-04 08:30:01 +0000 UTC View Post
“Each of our actions, our words, our attitudes is cut off from the ‘world,’ from the people who have not directly perceived it, by a medium the permeability of which is of infinite variation and remains unknown to ourselves; having learned by experience that some important utterance w...
2025-06-03 08:55:24 +0000 UTC View Post
“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselv...
2025-06-03 08:55:02 +0000 UTC View Post
A son, a scholar, speaks:
Our family is looking
for someone who knows how to pray.
Ora pro nobis, pray for us now
and now.
We sent
all our strong cousins out as runners. . . .
One of the cousins
brought back a doll
which he had purchased at great...
"1. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty te...
2025-06-02 08:03:29 +0000 UTC View Post
I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies – for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal.
Woman must...
2025-06-01 07:06:05 +0000 UTC View Post
“There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate—the genetic and neural fate—of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own p...
2025-06-01 07:05:48 +0000 UTC View Post
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundr...
2025-05-31 13:24:59 +0000 UTC View Post
“There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: A people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pr...
2025-05-30 06:05:38 +0000 UTC View Post
"And a poet said, Speak to us of Beauty.
And he answered:
Where shall you seek beauty, and how
shall you find her unless she herself be your
way and your guide?
And how shall you speak of her except
she be the weaver of your speech?
The aggrieved and the injured say,
...
"And a woman spoke, saying, Tell us of Pain.
And he said:
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the dail...
Peeks into a week in Crete, spent frolicking, suffering (aka hiking), talking to many a goat and, of course, shooting. Prepare for too many images from that trip to be shared here in the coming weeks and months ...
2025-05-29 08:46:53 +0000 UTC View Post
“Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is swee...
2025-05-28 10:57:54 +0000 UTC View Post