We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.
What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.
They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side. . . He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.
No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.
To get anywhere, or even to live a long time, a man has to guess, and guess right, over and over again, without enough data for a logical answer.
I'm trying to give people an idea of what black looks like and what white looks like before I introduce them to gray.
Bad leaders believe that they have to project control at all times.
People try to put us down (Talkin' 'bout my generation) Just because we get around (Talkin' 'bout my generation) Things they do look awful c-c-cold (Talkin' 'bout my generation) Hope I die before I get old.