“The doctor's wife ate two apples a day, just to be safe. But her husband kept coming home.”
― The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories, Vol. 1
― The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories, Vol. 1
“I know of a cure for everything: salt water...in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.”
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“Certain American uses of deconstruction, Derrida has observed, work to ensure ‘an institutional closure’ which serves the dominant political and economic interests of American society. Derrida is clearly out to do more than develop new techniques of reading: deconstruction is for him an ultimately political practice, an attempt to dismantle the logic by which a particular system of thought, and behind that a whole system of political structures and social institutions, maintains its force. He is not seeking, absurdly, to deny the existence of relatively determinate truths, meanings, identities, intentions, historical continuities; he is seeking rather to see such things as the effects of a wider and deeper history of language, of the unconscious, of social institutions and practices.”
― Literary Theory: An Introduction
― Literary Theory: An Introduction
“These two poles, the unconditional and the conditional, are absolutely heterogeneous, and must remain irreducible to one another. They are nonetheless indissociable: if one wants, and it is necessary, forgiveness to become effective, concrete, historic; if one wants it to arrive, to happen by changing things, it is necessary that this purity engage itself in a series of conditions of all kinds (psychosociological, political, etc.). It is between these two poles, irreconcilable but indissociable, that decisions and responsibilities are to be taken. Yet despite all the confusions which reduce forgiveness to amnesty or to amnesia, to acquittal or prescription, to the work of mourning or some political therapy of reconciliation, in short to some historical ecology, it must never be forgotten, nevertheless, that all of that refers to a certain idea of pure and unconditional forgiveness, without which this discourse would not have the least meaning. What complicates the question of ‘meaning’ is again what I suggested a moment ago: pure and unconditional forgiveness, in order to have its own meaning, must have no ‘meaning’, no finality, even no intelligibility. It is a madness of the impossible.”
― On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness
― On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness
“Here is an amazement—once I was twenty years old and in every motion of my body there was a delicious ease, and in every motion of the green earth there was a hint of paradise, and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.”
― West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems
― West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems
Ask Isabel Allende - Wednesday, February 12th!
— 1402 members
— last activity Feb 19, 2014 01:56PM
Join us on Wednesday, February 12th for a special discussion with author Isabel Allende! Isabel will be discussing her work in English and Spanish inc ...more
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