You cannot help but learn more as take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is and old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.

An old essay by John Updike begins, 'We live in an era of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements.' That language is general and abstract, near the top of the ladder. It provokes our thinking, but what concrete evidence leads Updike to his conclusion ? The answer is in his second sentence : 'Consider the beer can.' To be even more specific, Updike was complaining that the invention of the pop-top ruined the aesthetic experience of drinking beer. 'Pop-top' and 'beer' are at the bottom of the ladder, 'aesthetic experience' at the top.

The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.

History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.

"Hit it with the back of your left hand" was the first swing thought I ever heard, brusquely bu not unlovingly put to me by the aunt-in-law who had moments before placed a golf club in my virgin grip. I was twenty-five, and had spent my youth in a cloisterd precinct of teh middle class where golf was a rumoured something, like champagne breakfasts and divorce, that the rich did.

A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand; but we do trust film, and shadows, and light.