...despite all this, it is still hard to admit that there is no one more English than the Indian, no one more Indian than the English. There are still young white men who are angry about that; who will roll out at closing time into the poorly lit streets with a kitchen knife wrapped in a tight fist. But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance.

It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.

Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.

It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.

It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.

He traced the genealogy of the feeling.

She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.