Some people say the business about the jolly fat person is a myth, that all of us chubbies are neurotic, sick, sad people. I disag...ree. Fat people may not be chortling all day long, but they're a hell of a lot nicer than the wizened and shriveled. Thin people turn surly, mean and hard at a young age because they never learn the value of a hot fudge sundae for easing tension. Thin people don't like gooey soft things because they themselves are neither gooey nor soft. They are crunchy and dull, like carrots. They go straight to the heart of the matter while fat people let things stay all blurry and hazy and vague, they way things actually are. Thin people want to face the truth. Fat people know there is no truth.... Thin people believe in logic. Fat people see all sides. The sides fat people see are rounded blobs, usually gray, always nebulous and truly not worth worrying about. But the thin person persists. "If you consume more calories than you burn," says one of my thin friends, "you will gain weight. It's that simple." Fat people always grin when they hear that. They know better.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is this that, finally, I will try to teach my sons about sex, after I've explained fertile periods and birth control and all th...e other mechanics that are important to understand but never really go to the heart of the matter: I believe I will say that when you sleep with someone you take off a lot more than your clothes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At the heart of the matter of masculine excess is a great longing for the love and approval of a father, a man who can tell anothe...r man that his masculinity is splendid enough and he can now relax.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am black: I am the incarnation of a complete fusion with the world, an intuitive understanding of the earth, an abandonment of m...y ego in the heart of the cosmos, and no white man, no matter how intelligent he may be, can ever understand Louis Armstrong and the music of the Congo.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I, who am king of the matter I treat, and who owe an accounting for it to no one, do not for all that believe myself in all I writ...e. I often hazard sallies of my mind which I mistrust.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That the mere matter of a poem, for instance--its subject, its given incidents or situation; that the mere matter of a picture--th...e actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape--should be nothing without the form, the spirit of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter;Mthis is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now the truth of the matter is that there are a lot of things people don't understand. Take the Einstein theory. Take taxes. Take ...love. Do you understand them? Neither do I. But they exist. They happen.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The profoundest thoughts of the philosophers have something tricklike about them. A lot disappears in order for something to sudde...nly appear in the palm of the hand.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is... dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the... corrupt or evil man never practises. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »