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“Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed”
“human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability.”
Few writers can come close to King’s own daunting pace of ten pages—or two thousand words!—a day,
In 1999, King was walking down a road near his house in Maine and was hit by a van. The accident left him with a collapsed lung, four broken ribs, a fractured hip, and a lower leg broken in at least nine places. The pain in his hip was “just short of apocalyptic,” but five weeks later he began to write again; in fact he went back to finish On Writing.
Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976) Maxine Hong Kingston
women must play by society’s rules, and those who don’t will be forgotten.
“he will come to believe that a fanatic really is a virtuous hero, and that no one can be a hero without fanaticism.”
History does not repeat, but it does instruct,”
Signs that a new ruler is intent on subverting democracy, they write, include disrespect for a country’s constitution; contempt for rivals, characterizing them not as legitimate opponents but as enemies of the people; threats against the press; and the undermining of civil liberties.
the public. Those steps include capturing the referees (putting loyalists in place at agencies and courts that have the power to arbitrate, implement, or challenge policies and laws); sidelining or defaming high-profile opponents and media outlets; changing the rules of the game (via techniques like gerrymandering and voter suppression) to lock in the ruler’s (or party’s) advantages for years; and degrading norms of tolerance and fairness that protect pluralistic dialogue and reasoned debate.
“We have met the enemy, and they is us.”
“in pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches.”
his poetic love of language and storytelling, nurtured by the voracious reading he’d done since he was a boy; and his skill, as a lawyer, in the art of persuasion.
from the pensive and elegiac, to the humorous and playful, to the urgent and instructive.
It was a voice supple enough to accommodate everything from folksy storytelling to inspiring visions of a world responsive to “the better angels of our nature.”
Shakespeare remained a primary touchstone throughout Lincoln’s life, Kaplan observes, molding his almost existential view of mankind’s plight in a random, unpredictable world, while Aesop’s fables fueled his own use of storytelling as a means of illustration and moral argument.
“a place of intellectual retreat from the chaos and confusion of office where he could sort through conflicting options, and order his thoughts with words.”
It is no greater exaggeration to say that all modern political prose descends from the Gettysburg Address.”
Today, with accelerating climate change, the Arctic itself has become a victim of human hubris.
We learn that polar bears are so well insulated that they have trouble getting rid of excess heat (which they are said to deal with by eating snow), that they build dens using the same principles of architecture employed by Eskimos in building igloos, and that ancient legends say they cover their dark noses with a paw or a piece of snow so as to sneak up on seals unobserved.
Blood Meridian will give you nightmares. The story is almost unrelievedly violent and blood soaked and represents the grimmest, most primal distillation of the author’s Hobbesian view of the world. With Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy also created a potent retelling of America’s myth of the western frontier, leaving us with an ineradicable understanding of the costs in lives and suffering caused by the wars of extermination waged against Native Americans, and the policies of expulsion that enabled the theft of their ancestral lands. In fact, the novel exposes the dark imperialism at the heart
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Ian McEwan’s remarkable novel Atonement is a love story, a war story, and a story about the destructive powers of the imagination. It is also a remarkable tour de force—one of those novels that gains in resonance and nuance with every reading. The novel pivots around a terrible lie told by a thirteen-year-old girl named Briony Tallis—one motivated by jealousy, spite, an appetite for melodrama, and a willful naïveté about the workings of the grown-up world. Briony’s false accusations will send her older sister’s lover Robbie away to jail and shatter the family’s staid, upper-middle-class
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A GATE AT THE STAIRS (2009) Lorrie Moore
GATE AT THE STAIRS (2009) Lorrie Moore
Like Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy and At Weddings and Wakes, this novel explores, with exacting emotional precision, the promises and insufficiencies of love, and the loneliness that haunts even the most doting of families.
runaway slave named Sethe cuts the throat of her baby daughter with a handsaw to spare her the fate she suffered herself as a slave (Beloved);
a woman pours kerosene on her drug-addicted son and sets him on fire (Sula).
master sorcerer
How can death exist when they lead camels along a springtime street?”)
studying butterflies and playing chess);
John Updike, Thomas Pynchon, Martin Amis, Don DeLillo, and Zadie Smith. Even Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who studied under Nabokov at Cornell University as an undergraduate, said he changed the way she read and the way she wrote: “He taught me the importance of choosing the right word and presenting it in the right word order.”
my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue”) for a “second-rate brand of English,”
“a champion figure skater switching to roller skates.”
logging more than 200,000 miles in search of butterflies in places like the Rocky Mountains and the Grand Canyon.
Azar Nafisi’s
Reading Lolita in Tehran, is
Her
“The biggest sin is to be blind to others’ problems and pains,” Nafisi writes. “Not seeing them means denying
Lack of empathy was to my mind the central sin of the regime, from which all the others flowed.”
Some of Naipaul’s later writings about what he called “half-made societies,” places in Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East, where “the West is packing its boxes, waiting for the helicopters,” were warped by his contempt for his subjects—his bitter, misanthropic view of human nature, and the accusations of ignorance, superstition, and passivity he hurled at the developing world. Naipaul acknowledged the personal roots of this scorn and how it
His fourth book, A House for Mr. Biswas is Naipaul’s masterpiece. Alienation has not yet hardened into cynicism
His dad, Naipaul wrote in
Like
and regulations.” The
The
Not since Lincoln has there been a president who has so powerfully used his eloquence as a writer—to inspire, to persuade, to articulate a vision—as Barack Obama. His most memorable speeches use the prism of history to amplify and crystallize the meaning of an occasion, reminding us of the ideals of liberty, justice, and equality that America was founded upon and the continuing, nearly two-and-a-half-century-long journey to make the promises of the Declaration of Independence real for everyone. Like Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., Obama has a long view of history; he sees the country as
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During
Rudolph Giuliani had
“Truth isn’t truth.”
Richards’s prose is like his guitar playing: intense, elemental, utterly distinctive, and achingly, emotionally direct.
