There is fire and fire: The fire that burns and the fire that gives warmth, a fire that sets a forest ablaze and the fire that puts a cat to sleep. So is it with self-love. The member that once seemed one of the wonders of the world soon becomes as homely as an old slipper. Mathew and himself gradually ceased to excite each other.

Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism's high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.

All isms end in fascism.

We "need" cancer because, by the very fact of its incurability, it makes all other diseases, however virulent, not cancer.

The earth is mankind's ultimate haven, our blessed terra firma. When it trembles and gives way beneath our feet, it's as though one of God's checks has bounced.

There is fire and fire: The fire that burns and the fire that gives warmth, a fire that sets a forest ablaze and the fire that puts a cat to sleep. So is it with self-love. The member that once seemed one of the wonders of the world soon becomes as homely as an old slipper. Mathew and himself gradually ceased to excite each other.

In New York -- whose subway trains in particular have been ''tattooed'' with an energy to put our own rude practitioners to shame -- not an inch of free space is spared except that of advertisements . Even the most chronically dispossessed appear prepared to endorse the legitimacy of the ''haves.