books

"My religious reading has long been confined to the moral branch of religion, which is the same in all religions; while in that branch which consists of dogmas, all differ"

"Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human …"

"We know it because, if we look below the surface, we sense it still spreading on every continent — for it is the most humane, the most advanced, and in the end the most unconquerable of all forms of h…"

"When I was writing The Woman Warrior, I felt that I was writing something completely different; that nothing like it had ever been written. So I thought if I couldn’t get it published, I would just ke…"

"Did I say that? One says so many things, and the problem is they all get written down."

"…But as far as the novel makes reference to that, Miguel seems to be willing to concede to the mother’s care more than enforce macho authority over the sickly boy. Miguel is a man of the new millennia…"

": "Multimedia? As far as I’m concerned, it’s reading with the radio on."

"Globalization can also be seen as flow of "nothing" , involving the spread of non-places, non-things, non-people and non-services."

"The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncove…"

"Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?"

"The Mystery of Zhou Enlai" by Jonathan Spence, reviewed in The New York Review of Books"

"The only way which this ruling sees out of what it calls “the communal strife” is that Hindu history should be substantially diluted and tailored to the needs of Islamic imperialism, and that Muslim h…"

"I have my detractors in Washington. There are bastards who spread things around, of course, who planted nasty things in the media."

"Henry Miller belonged in kind, though not in stature, to the great odd-man-out figures of literature like Blake, Whitman and Lawrence. Despite his incoherence as artist and philosopher he made a power…"

"Books are my one luxury."

"While McMurphy laughs. Rocking farther and farther backward against the cabin top, spreading his laugh out across the water — laughing at the girl, at the guys, at George, at me sucking my bleeding th…"

"Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won't have to write it."

"Already in this country, as a result of the recent controversy, it is written in the constitution of the socialist party that "any member of the party who opposes political action or advocates crime, …"

"Heaven, in the production of things, is sure to be bountiful to them, according to their qualities. Hence the tree that is flourishing, it nourishes, while that which is ready to fall, it overthrows."

"If you merely read this book you will not reach the Way of strategy. Absorb the things written in this book. Do not just read, memorise or imitate, but so that you realise the principle from within yo…"