Justice is the most "political" or institutional of the virtues. The legitimacy of a state rests upon its claim to do justice.
-You forgot something important! -What? -It's under my sweater! -WHAT?! -Me!
It's a good idea to have your own books with you in a strange place
You know a great many things in dreams, often despite the evidence of your eyes. You just know them.
Stories never really end. . . even if the books like to pretend they do. Stories always go on. They don't end on the last page, any more than they begin on the first page.
Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?" Mo had said. . . "As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells. . . and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower. . . both strange and familiar.
Fire and water," he said, "don't really mix. You could say they're incompatible. But when they do love each other, they love passionately.
I would argue, for perspective's sake, that the arc of a really literary work is precisely that it both intensely reflects, and simultaneously transcends the conditions of its making. I would say that is the difference between literature and other kinds of writing. That is what the literary is - it ultimately doesn't matter what his circumstances were. And the thing that you were just saying about being sympathetic to Brontë and the fact that she could only write what she wrote when she wrote it. . . that's true. But look at that novel, which means so much to so many people.
I got ham but I'm not a Hamster
If you want it, measure it. If you can't measure it, forget it.
Why go to a machine when you could go to a human being?