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[They were] there to speak with the famous poet, practically an old man now, who, in his youth was bellicose, ferocious, but then his will bent to events, to life, his ferocity turned to sarcasm and disappointment, and when it came to battles, he'd developed the skepticism of one who'd fought and lost and now believed the fight was in vain.

A peasant, thigh deep in water, ploughs his field with a plough as primitive as those his fathers have used for forty mortal centuries. The water buffalo splashes sinister through the mud and his cynical eyes seem to ask what end has been served by this unending toil.

Once or twice I've even had dates with these boys, been to coffee shops nearby and listened to them talk. They're such good bright boys that I should be in awe, but on these dates I'm always left cold. I sit as they talk and feel nothing for them, and the world keeps turning, but no one knows what turns in me.

My manner of life at that time was desultory and unsettled. I had a sorrow—no matter of what kind—and I took to rambling about Europe, not certainly in the hope of forgetting it, for I had no wish to forget, but because of the restlessness that made one place after another triste and intolerable to me.

'Young man,' he said at length, 'your story is strange and you bring strange evidence to bear upon it. It may be as you say; it may be that you are the dupe of some waking dream -- I know not.'

Yesterday I was young—yesterday I left my ship, with hope in my heart, and brown locks upon my head; today, I am a middle-aged man—today, I find my ship rotting on a desolate beach, the hair white upon my brow, and the future all a blank!

Another oppressive September has settled over Havana. Heat peels the bark off trees, leaving the streets of Vedado redolent with sweat and regret. It is not yet time for tonight's apagón [blackout] and all the TVs are tuned to replays of yesterday's big news about the princess, killed in a tunnel.

So, while in a way [Sidney Lanier] invented a style, it was therefore not a good style, it was seldom or never natural, direct or simple, and it abounded in errors of taste and verbal effects that were constantly forced and suggested a kind of archaism that was false and hollow.

The impulse to write in verse had come to [Melville], oddly enough, at the moment when the prose-impulse had quite run out, a reversal of the usual order, and he stubbornly continued to compose and print, privately at times, at his own expense, the rhymes that a handful of readers at best were aware of.

Whitman spoke from an intimate knowledge of [the common people], for his real occupation for years was to mingle with crowds, especially of the young, developing his gifts of empathy and observation. Almost every day he crossed the East River on the Fulton ferry, where he made himself at home in the pilot-house, sometimes staying there half the day ....

[Southern writers] were driven to complain of their isolation, the uncongeniality of the atmosphere, the limited audience at best which the South afforded, conditions that obliged them to publish their work in the North or abroad if they wished it to receive the least attention.

She wore a dress that was so shport that when she bent over, it revealed her pink underwear. Her legs and thighs were pudgy and shapeless, as is often the case at that awkward age. They were like the legs of a cheap doll and were the same artificial color.

The translator [of these stories] has to convey the suggestive sounds of the tribal dialects that her tribal characters speak, the fire of the anguish and anger that her heroines breathe, the subtle nuances in her description of the Bengali political scenario where most of her stories take birth, the chilling asides while describing a murderous plot which may be hatched in a police station....

I raised my shadow from the ground and stepped into the Twilight.

The forest was transformed into an eddying haze, a phantom. Only the very largest of the trees had twins in the Twilight world.

Plebeians [in Coriolanus] shout at each other in a rather confused matter, but in their speeches a detailed theory of class division is formulated. It is based on three elementary contrasts: some people work, others feed on their misert; some are poor, others are rich; some are placed low and have to obey, others are placed high and rule.

If we strip Othello of romantic varnish, of everything that is opera and melodrama, the tragedy of jealousy and the tragedy of betrayed confidence become a dispute between Othello and Iago: the dispute on the nature of the world. Is this world good or bad? What are the limits of suffering; what is the ultimate purpose of the few brief moments that pass between birth and death?

The world offers a spectacle similar to a storm or hurricane. Weak bushes are bowed down to the earth, while tall trees fall uprooted. The order of history and the order of nature are both cruel; terrifying are the passions that breed in the human heart.

Four or five times in his life, he had met people with cold eyes, those eyes that can stare at you without establishing any human contact, without giving any sense of the universal human need to communicate with one's fellow man.

Four or five times in his life, he had met people with cold eyes, those eyes that can stare at you without establishing any human contact, without giving any sense of the universal human need to communicate with one's fellow man.

The young slave who played the princess rashly ventured out in the middle of a storm, was seized by a whirlwind, flung a mile through the air, and dashed against the rock face of a mountain. She was the only casualty, just as she had been the only woman in the cast.

All five of them surrounded by blowflies finally recognized what was peeping out from the yellow foam on the water's surface: the rotten face of a corpse floating among the rushes and the plastic bags swept in from the road on the breeze, the dark mask seething under a myriad of black snakes, smiling.

As she grew up, she had discovered, with outrage, the teachings which separated the Gospels and the self-serving, egotistical, petty behavior of self-righteous people; she defended herself against their hypocrisy ny adopting a firm stance of cynicism.

It wasn't the nasty words that woke the boy up late at night—he was used to sleeping with noise—but the banging on the cardboard box, a discarded refrigerator container someone had tossed onto the sidewalk a couple days before and that had now become his bed and home.

The Hotel Rector was a thousand years old, and bespoke a despair that was uniquely Hollywood: the lobby was crowded with elderly pensioners awaiting their monthly stipends, black prostitutes, and low riders drinking beer. It smelled of urine and liniment. The loneliness there was almost tangible.

Berkeley gave me the creeps: the people passing by looked aesthetic and angry, driven inward by forces they couldn't comprehend and rendered sickly by their refusal to eat meat.

My promotion to resident guard will be a bad day for your father, He said he'd come and live with us at the Center, He did, but he said it in the same way that we all say that one day we're going to die.

Life is like that, full of words that are not worth saying or that were worth saying once but not any more, each word that we utter will take up the space of another more deserving word, not deserving in its own right, but because of the consequences of saying it.