One thing that's great about having kids, especially given my career, is that it forces you out of your narcissism. I mean, I'm in a career where my product is me. So it was nice to have something, someone, come along and take the focus off me. I really needed to give myself some distractions from myself.
The work-life balance is a harsh reality for so many women, who are forced every day to make impossible choices. Do they take their kids to the doctor...and risk getting fired? Do they work weekends so they can afford to send their kids to better childcare...even though it means even less time with their families? Do they take another shift at work, so they can pay for piano lessons for their kids...even though it means they have to stop volunteering for the PTA? It just shouldn't be this difficult to raise healthy families.
Yet far from putting any meaningful constraints on law enforcement in this war, the U.S. Supreme Court has given the police license to stop and search just about anyone, in any public place, without a shred of evidence of criminal activity, and it has also closed the courthouse doors to claims of racial bias at every stage of the judicial process from stops and searches to plea bargaining and sentencing.
Violence is not the only means of persuasion.
Poets and painters have the power to dare, I mean to dare to do whatever they may approve of.
When I was younger, many of my romantic escapades were just a means of simply avoiding being by myself. I was afraid of feeling lonely, afraid I wouldn't know what to say to myself.
But without the experience of actually singing or playing these things yourself, you don't have the same kind of involvement or understanding of what these musical moves mean. And that is a very big problem in addressing the future of music.
Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today. Let me repeat that: Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today! I mean it. Shakespeare was a better stylist, Melville was more important to American letters, and Charles Dickens had a defter hand at creating characters. But among living writers, there is nobody who can even approach Gene Wolfe for brilliance of prose, clarity of thought, and depth in meaning
Being a philosophical naturalist does not mean that one thinks that science can provide all of the answers. That is scientism and that is wrong. I don't think a billion buckets of science could speak to the problems raised by the Tea Party. Being a philosophical naturalist does not mean that one thinks that the only truths are those of science. I think the claim just made in the last sentence is true but I don't think it is a claim of science. It means that you use science where you can and you respect and try to emulate its standards.
If you want something that's going to provide you with a lot of challenges and a variety of different things to do, then you really can't beat a place like the Air Force. I don't mean this to sound like a recruiting pitch. But it's been a lot of fun.
Just because you can thrill a toddler by chewing with your mouth open doesn’t mean you should.
Because I want every kid to be viewed as a person rather than as a member of a certain race does not mean that I'm not black enough. . . . Do they want me to be positive just for black kids and negative for everybody else?
Just because it's in print doesn't mean it's the gospel.
Deflation means a slowdown of income growth. Markets shrink, new capital investment and employment also taper off, so wages decline. That is what's happening as deliberate policy in Europe and the United States. Falling or stagnant prices are simply the result of having less income to spend.
Don't think that the lack of leaders and of a party ideological line means anarchy, if by anarchy you mean chaos, bedlam, and pandemonium. What a tragic lack of political imagination to think that leaders and centralized structures are the only way to organize effective political projects!
I've always thought vampires were interesting because they live forever, they're always well-financed, they dress well, you know what I mean? And they're, like, cool. Usually vampire - you've never seen a broke vampire. Have you?
There is a means to every end. A root to any cause. Sometimes the root is more evil than any cause, though it's the cause that is usually most vilified.
The number eighteen is symbolically meaningful because it is the numerical equivalent of the Hebrew word chai, which means life.
Know thyself means this, that you get acquainted with what you know, and what you can do.
Love means each person is free to follow his or her own heart.
I think there's something inherently different about working with females. I mean, it's just a different way of looking at life, being a woman. But I think we can handle many things at one time and I don't think that's necessarily true for men.
Owning your curves means being confident - actually being confident - in your own skin. Growing up was tricky for me, it was so hard to shop with all of my friends and not being able to fit into the tiny clothes they were wearing.
When we're being grateful it means that we're acknowledging that life is a gift, that life is a blessing, that this body is only here for a short period of time and it really shifts the whole internal landscape of the mind and it puts things into perspective and it allows us to get our bearings. To get a firm footing in what's real, and then go from there.
To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That's what Norman Mailer did. That's what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that's what I do - that's what I mean to do.
I've had people explain to me what one of my poems meant, and I've been surprised that it means that to them. If a person can use a poem of mine to interpret her life or his life, good. I can't control that. Nor would I want to.
