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The truth about parenthood is that it abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger.

At least one in three of my generation at school died; because they all took commissions as soon as they could, most of them in the infantry and Royal Flying Corps. The average life expectancy of an infantry subaltern on the Western Front was, at some stages of the war, only about three months; by which time he had been either wounded or killed.

‘Let me out quickly,’ she said, and knelt patiently by the side of the road among the rubbish and the dead grass until the spasm passed, thinking that while you can escape the major illnesses all your life, it’s undeniable that something is going to happen to you in the end.

I hoped for a future but it just isn’t here.

Age is an immense sadness that seems to be folded into everything.

There's a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.

People leave their lives scattered all over the internet.

Tangerine gave its name to a color. Satsumas and clementine did not.

The necessity for a form of socialism is based on the observation that the world’s present economic arrangements doom most of the world to misery; that the way of life dictated by these arrangements is both sterile and immoral; and, finally, that there is no hope for peace in the world so long as these arrangements obtain.

White America remains unable to believe that black America’s grievances are real; they are unable to believe this because they cannot face what this fact says about themselves and their country; and the effect of this massive and hostile incomprehension is to increase the danger in which all black people live here, especially the young.

As late as the 1590s teachers at Cambridge could be fined five shillings for any thought that contradicted Aristotle's writing.

The miracle is that the earth holds the weight of the living, the dead, and our imaginations, but it doesn’t sink.

We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it.

Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become.

Poetry is powerful in part because it exists in the questions and holds no answers. It’s the opposite of a polemic, or a prescription; instead, it’s an interrogation of the world and one’s place within it. That said, even though it doesn’t hold answers, perhaps it IS an answer.

we are lucky enough to live a life in poetry, we are never alone—we are never alone because everyone who has ever written is with us.

I'm a reasonable man. Wouldn’t you say there are times the reasonable thing to do after a concerted effort at stalling the self-destruction of what you hold dear and fought for might not be to start a fire and let things bloody well burn?

Any favour is a gamble. You know your quid may not be pro quoed, but that doesn’t mean you’ve no right to irritation if it isn’t.

It’s ugly and it brings one up short, yes. But might not poetry do that? The efficacy of words is wildly overstated, most especially by those who work with them.

If one opens the doors of one’s mind, nowhere’s unhaunted.

Don’t tell me to believe. Don’t tell me to believe in the same God or laws that men believe in who commit these murders. Don’t tell me to believe that God can bless this country and that men are judged by their peers.

"Gumbo was something you could always eat, even if you were not hungry."

-Truer words never writ.

They sentence you to death because you were at the wrong place at the wrong time, with no proof that you had anything at all to do with the crime other than being there when it happened. Yet six months later they come and unlock your cage and tell you, We, us, white folks all, have decided it’s time for you to die, because this is the convenient date and time.

Everything was superior when there were fewer resources. Nowadays, it is the value of the materials and not the genius of artists which people look for. What people are really interested in now are the lifelike portraits of gladiators. Everything is but a shadow of a golden past. The colors will fade in the twilight of history.

At the university I had read about slave masters who had done the same when buying new slaves, and I had read of cattlemen doing it when purchasing horses and cattle. At least Dr. Joseph had graduated to the level where he let the children spread out their own lips, rather than using some kind of crude metal instrument. I appreciated his humanitarianism.

—Never underestimate the tenacity of steady-as-she-goes.

You make a god, it doesn’t mean it’ll help you. You make its enemy out of nothing, it doesn’t mean it isn’t your enemy.

To trust in the arts is an act of hubris so self-destructive the gods don’t even bother to punish you for it. It is to become a monstrous politician of an insecure republic, an estate agent of your own soul, a demon of lubricity.

There is just a chance, though, the width of a crack in a martini glass, that we need it more than ever.

In general, we live by comparison and competition, says Blend, after a pause. You’d be depressed to learn how many findings from psychological research are applied to concepts in business school to manipulate consumer habits. Brand awareness, marketing, models of leadership, the constant slurry of consumer economics.