In an average day, you may well be confronted with some species of bullying or bigotry, or some ill-phrased appeal to the general will, or some petty abuse of authority. If you have a political loyalty, you may be offered a shady reason for agreeing to a lie or a half-truth that serves some short-term purpose. Everybody devises tactics for getting through such moments; try behaving "as if" they need not be tolerated and are not inevitable.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren't always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist. And there is no decent or charted way of making a living at it. It is something you are, and not something you do.

I learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language - always the language - was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry.

When you fall ill, people send you CDs. Very often, in my experience, these are by Leonard Cohen

For some reason, which I believe I can guess, the churches/mosques want control of people when or while they are the most vulnerable or suggestible. If they can't get them in school, then they get them when they are hungry, or frightened, or ill, or homeless, or unemployed. Same difference. Here's your gruel, and here's a tract.