Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present. It requires feeling its own pressure on your pulses without any ex post facto illumination.

To get home you had to end the war. To end the war was the reason you fought it. The only reason.

Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.

Anybody who notices unpleasant facts in the have-a-nice-day world we live in is going to be designated a curmudgeon.

All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel

I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals.