Flight Reservation Systems decide whether or not you exist. If your information isn't in their database, then you simply don't get to go anywhere.

An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.

The American Dream is the largely unacknowledged screen in front of which all American writing plays itself out.

Jerusalem is ... the fabled city which for the Western mind is as much dream as stone ... a compressed symbol of our most sublime aspirations along with our most disgusting, hatefully brainless excursions into religious bigotry and fratricide.

most of the time we settle for half and i like it better, even as i know how wrong he was and his death useless, i tremble for i confess that something peversley pure calls to me from his memory

Glamour, that trans-human aura or power to attract imitation, is a kind of vessel into which dreams are poured, and some vessels are simply worthier than others... A beautiful woman can turn heads but real glamour has a deeper pull... Glamour is the power to rearrange people's emotions, which, in effect, is the power to control one's environment.

The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.