We live surrounded by an endless multitude of mysteries. But no matter how enigmatic may be the mysteries which surround being, what is most enigmatic and disturbing is that mystery in general exists and that we are somehow definitely and forever cut off from the sources and beginnings of life.

“The individual who has lived through a great historical upheaval has not only been dispossessed of his beliefs. He has found himself face to face with a reality that goes far beyond him and everyone else.

My first book was The Adventures of Mao on the Long March. Roy Lichtenstein did the cover for me. Roy was really the reason it got published because no one wanted to take it. Nobody, nobody, would take the book.

For there is no nonsense in this man about Communism or anti-Communism. He is an honest observer and straight thinker.

It seems that an unjust world is still having problems justly distributing its injustices.

The “rulers” (industrialists, military men, bankers, bureaucrats, etc.) with their various tasks, are merely effective slaves who work unknowingly on behalf of these hidden masters, and thus for a contemplative caste that ceaselessly forms the “values” and the meaning of life.

When the delight of frolicking with his pets wears thin, the count feasts on large fruit tarts, which he inundates with jugs of cream.

If I am, in fact, the type of person who recognizes himself in a reflection, then I can say while at the Vietnam Memorial there is one member of my family elegized, mirrored, because that is a condition too, like war and tectonics: Every so often we forget that we are we who we think

She’s earned our attention, weirdly enough, by being perfectly absent. I think Black is a spokesmodel for the concept that we needn’t envy the wealthy, since they are far more culturally clueless than we could have suspected.

The authors of The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election, Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz, in conversation with TNI.

There is a difference between being (and the desire to be) well-read and being (and the desire to be) thought well-read.

How often I feel, as if hearing a voice behind intermittent sounds, that I myself am the underlying bitterness of this life so alien to human life— a life in which nothing happens except in its self-awareness!

Ten years before she would publish Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë sent a poem to poet laureate Robert Southey asking for his opinion. Their resulting exchange is interesting…