Canlit might not exert the fascination of – say – a venereal wart.
But hatred and viciousness are addictive.
There is a Do this or a Do that with God, but not any Because.
They thought he was only what they could see. A nice boy but a bit of a goof, a bit of a show-off. Not the brightest star in the universe; not a numbers person, but you couldn’t have everything you wanted and at least he wasn’t a total washout.
Inside John, she thinks, is another John, who is much nicer. This other John will emerge like a butterfly from a cocoon, a Jack from a box, a pit from a prune, if the first John is only squeezed enough.
Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.
This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the work shatter. I want to be with someone.
The gate clicks behind me. The tulips along the border are redder than ever, opening, no longer wine cups by chalices; thrusting themselves up, to what end? They are, after all, empty.
It is the strict adherence to daily routine that tends towards the maintenance of good morale and the preservation of sanity,” he says out loud.
As a species we’re pathetic in that way: imperfectly monogamous. If we could only pair-bond for life, like gibbons, or else opt for total guilt-free promiscuity, there’d be no more sexual torment.
All this is pure speculation. I don’t really know what men used to say. I had only their words for it.
The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.
Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.
I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one ‘race’ – the human race – and that we are all members of it.
It’s a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography – but if you write your biography, it’s equally assumed you’re lying your head off.
Reading is one of the most individual things that happens. So every reader is going to read a piece in a slightly different way, sometimes a radically different way.
Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.
Men and women are not “equal” if “equal” means “exactly the same.” Our many puzzlements and indeed unhappinesses come from trying to figure out what the differences really mean, or should mean, or should not mean.
As human beings, we are always torn between individual freedom and the ability of choose our actions, and the need for at least enough social structure so that anarchy, chaos, and warlordery – or the war of all against all – can be avoided.
Kafka thought his stories were hilarious. We don’t necessarily have that reaction to them, but he certainly laughed his head off every time he read them out loud.