Africa has a genious for extremes, for the beginning and the end. It seems simultaneously connected to some memory of Eden and to some foretaste of apocalypse. Nowhere is day more vivid or night darker. Nowhere are forests more luxuriant. Nowhere is there a continent more miserable

Human ingenuity has given centuries to the goal of ensuring that the human body might move around at an even 68 degrees all year.

The kiss is a wordless articulation of desire whose object lies in the future, and somewhat to the south.

A rattlesnake loose in the living room tends to end all discussion of animal rights.

Everywhere you hang your hat is home. Home is the bright cave under the hat.

Walter Duranty helped to turn the monster Stalin into a world figure and a hero of the leftistWestern intelligentsia by defending the bloodbath of the Soviet Union from its critics in the now famous: "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.

As American productivity, once the exuberant engine of national wealth, has dipped to an embarrassingly uncompetitive low, Americans have shaken their heads: the country's old work ethic is dead.