Holidays are in no sense an alternative to the congestion and bustle of cities and work. Quite the contrary. People look to escape... into an intensification of the conditions of ordinary life, into a deliberate aggravation of those conditions: further from nature, nearer to artifice, to abstraction, to total pollution, to well above average levels of stress, pressure, concentration and monotony--this is the ideal of popular entertainment. No one is interested in overcoming alienation; the point is to plunge into it to the point of ecstasy. That is what holidays are for.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All children's books are about ideals. Adult fiction sets out to portray and then explain the world as it really is; books for chi...ldren present it as it should be. Child readers come to them hoping for a certain amount of instruction, but chiefly for stories in which the petty restrictions of ordinary life are removed: they want to encounter people who can fly, geese that lay golden eggs, frogs that turn into princes, spaceships piloted by children, anything that measures up to their ideals of adventure and imagination. Adults, on the other hand, are more likely to want to feed the children a set of moral examples. By all means, let them have their fun, but the opportunity of providing models of ideal behaviour is not to be wasted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a ...hat and a gun.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A ...conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It would be disingenuous, however, not to point out that some things are considered as morally certain, that is, as having suffici...ent certainty for application to ordinary life, even though they may be uncertain in relation to the absolute power of God.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As an example of just how useless these philosophers are for any practice in life there is Socrates himself, the one and only wise... man, according to the Delphic Oracle. Whenever he tried to do anything in public he had to break off amid general laughter. While he was philosophizing about clouds and ideas, measuring a flea's foot and marveling at a midge's humming, he learned nothing about the affairs of ordinary life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What we grieve for is not the loss of a grand vision, but rather the loss of common things, events and gestures.... ordinariness i...s the most precious thing we struggle for, what the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto fought for. Not noble causes or abstract theories. But the right to go on living with a sense of purpose and a sense of self-worth--an ordinary life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This death's livery which walled its bearers from ordinary life was sign that they have sold their wills and bodies to the State: ...and contracted themselves into a service not the less abject for that its beginning was voluntary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »