Like pregnant women lose their teeth feeding the stranger, junkies lose their yellow fangs feeding the monkey.
For me to see is to read. It has always been that way.
The doctor's wife wasn't a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too taken up with rooting out the pride she was prone to feeling in her own holiness to notice any other failings she might have had. She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.
All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.
A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story.
Our clients' faces, with the customary outward paleness and inner glow of the book lover.
And sometimes then he sat with us for an hour or so, sharing our limbo, listening while I read. Books from any shelf, opened at any page, in which I would start and finish anywhere, mid-sentence sometimes. Wuthering Heights ran into Emma, which gave way to The Eustace Diamonds, which faded into Hard Times, which ceded to The Woman in White. Fragments. It didn't matter. Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline.
Of course I will look at anything, but I have not got the time or the patience to keep on looking at art that I know could be better. I don't want art that needs fixing, I want art that sends me back to the studio to fix my own.
Partake of love as a temperate man partakes of wine; do not become intoxicated.
Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft.
THE MAN. Can't they realize that mankind was founded on two basic principles? Religion and Death? The one motivates the other. Both motivate the man!