“You knew me the moment you saw me. You said I see with the wood’s eyes. That’s why you turned to Laurel. You were afraid of me.”
“Rois—” He was trembling; I could hear the leaves rustle around him. “Yes. You seemed to live in the borderlands of the world I tried to escape. You [...]
The Bush presidency is like being married to a sociopath. A McCain presidency would be more like being married to a drug addict — however badly he behaves, he could always sober up.
– Jonathan Chait, “A McCain Presidency Wouldn’t Be So Bad”
Except continuously making the excuse that your drug addict spouse could sober up leads [...]
I’m not sure if this is a new lesson, but [campaigning for the American presidency] reinforced my belief that we’re not as divided as our politics would indicate. You meet with the average person—I don’t care whether they’re Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal—they don’t think in labels. They’re not particularly ideological. Everybody is [...]
Our very dualistic nature [where we believe that our minds are separate from our bodies] has also been a stumbling block on the road to unlocking the mechanisms of consciousness. There are those who feel that the essence of consciousness cannot have a physical explanation, that it is so wondrous that it can’t be [...]
When it comes to falling in love there are, I think, two kinds of people. The first one who has a well-laid plan by which they seek a partner that possesses certain preferred qualities and characteristics. Upon finding such a person, they pursue a cautious and measured courtship, waiting for signs of reassurance before giving [...]
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
– Benjamin Franklin
My father is a composer, and I played the oboe all through my childhood and youth. In my family, we listened to music as the primary culture. In writing, I always have to have a sense of the way the piece sounds. Finding the voice initially is like a musician finds how [...]
The plain fact is that girls today have to be “bad” to fit in, just as the baby boomers needed to be good. And we are finding that this new script may be more oppressive than the old one ever was. The psychologist Nina Shandler offers a shrewd insight: “The conformist mentality has [...]
I believe that the dearth of accurate representations of Asian Americans in the media and in the arts has led to misrepresentation of Asian Americans. Very often Asian Americans are perceived as highly competent, hardworking, and non-belligerent—that being the “positive” image—or they are represented as devious, inscrutable, and megalomaniacal. Whichever way it is [...]
