The point here is ... to be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.

No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still "are" human beings, now. Or can be.

Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.

There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it.

There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact - in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself - of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were.

Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.