I do not think that literature is the primary instrument for social transformation, but I do think it has potency. So I work to te...ll the truth about people's lives; I work to celebrate struggle, to applaud the tradition of struggle in our community, to bring to center stage all those characters, just ordinary folks on the block, who've been waiting in the wings, characters we thought we had to ignore because they weren't pimp-flashy or hustler-slick or because they didn't fit easily into previously acceptable modes or stock types. I want to lift up some usable truths ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They wouldn't be heroes if they were infallible, in fact they wouldn't be heroes if they weren't miserable wretched dogs, the pari...ahs of the earth, besides which the only reason to build up an idol is to tear it down again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most literature on the culture of adolescence focuses on peer pressure as a negative force. Warnings about the "wrong crowd" read ...like tornado alerts in parent manuals. . . . It is a relative term that means different things in different places. In Fort Wayne, for example, the wrong crowd meant hanging out with liberal Democrats. In Connecticut, it meant kids who weren't planning to get a Ph.D. from Yale.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin--a la...nguage with which it has precious little in common. In Latin, to take one example, it is not possible to split an infinitive. So in English, the early authorities decided, it should not be possible to split an infinitive either. But there is no reason why we shouldn't, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren't available to the Romans. Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football. It is a patent absurdity. But once this insane notion became established, grammarians found themselves having to draw up ever more complicated and circular arguments to accommodate the inconsistencies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Poor workers! First they're cuckolded, and, as if that weren't enough, then they're beaten! Work's a curse, Saturno. I say to hell... with the work you have to do to earn a living! That kind of work does us no honor; all it does is fill up the bellies of the pigs who exploit us. But the work you do because you like to do it, because you've heard the call, you've got a vocation--that's ennobling! We should all be able to work like that. Look at me, Saturno--I don't work. And I don't care if they hang me, I won't work! Yet I'm alive! I may live badly, but at least I don't have to work to do it!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's like a jumble of huts in a jungle somewhere. I don't understand how you can live there. It's really, completely dead. Walk al...ong the street, there's nothing moving. I've lived in small Spanish fishing villages which were literally sunny all day long everyday of the week, but they weren't as boring as Los Angeles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You feel you could pucker up and blow away the miles between 49 Bard Road [Brixton] and that apartment in New York where I could b...e tomorrow morning, if the apartment still existed, if Peregrine still existed, if the past weren't deeper than the sea, more difficult to cross.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[My father] was a lazy man. It was the days of independent incomes, and if you had an independent income you didn't work. You were...n't expected to. I strongly suspect that my father would not have been particularly good at working anyway. He left our house in Torquay every morning and went to his club. He returned, in a cab, for lunch, and in the afternoon went back to the club, played whist all afternoon, and returned to the house in time to dress for dinner.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Don Diègue: Rodrigue, have you any courage? Don Rodrigue: If you weren't my father, you would have a taste of it on the spot.... ("Rodrigue, as-tu du coeur?" "Tout autre que mon père/L'éprouverait sur l'heure.")LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Computers were originally just supposed to be number-crunchers, but now their number-crunching has been harnessed in a thousand im...aginative ways to create new virtual machines, such as video games and word processors, in which the underlying number-crunching is almost invisible, and in which new powers seem quite magical. Our brains, similarly, weren't designed (except for some very recent peripheral organs) for word processing, but now a large portion--perhaps even the lion's share--of the activity that takes place in adult human brains is involved in a sort of word processing: speech production and comprehension, and the serial rehearsal and rearrangement of linguistic items, or better, their neural surrogates. And these activities magnify and transform the underlying hardware powers in ways that seem (from the "outside") quite magical.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »