I've done a bit of smuggling, I've run my share of grass. I made enough money to buy Miami, but I piss it away so fast.
I was no good at being a child.
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.
History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.
There is no such thing as unfortunate genius; if a man or woman is fit for work, God appoints the field.
A home-made friend wears longer than one you buy in the market.
We must keep in mind that only a part of memory can be translated into the language-based packets of information people use to tell their life stories to others. Learning to be open to many layers of communication is a fundamental part of getting to know another person's life.