I was horrified in high school by the fate of the hanged maids at the end of the Odyssey; it seemed unfair to me, even then.

Keep an eye on the weather, which is changing faster than predicted, and on the new diseases escaping or being made, even as we speak. It's a race between new tech and biosphere bankruptcy, I'd say.

By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being.

Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he'll take kindness any day of the week, if there's nothing more alluring to be had.

The characters [of The Tempest] have always been favorites of mine. It is one of his meditations on art - what it does.

What’s with her?” says the painter. “She’s mad because she’s a woman,” Jon says. This is something I haven’t heard for years, not since high school. Once it was a shaming thing to say, and crushing to have it said about you, by a man. It implied oddness, deformity, sexual malfunction. I go to the living room doorway. “I’m not mad because I’m a woman,” I say. “I’m mad because you’re an asshole.

Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.