Columnists

"California was almost entirely dream, a dream vague but deep in the minds of a westering people."

"Our friend alcohol was given us of the gods to make us see for a while that we are more nearly men and women, more nearly kind and gentle and generous, pleasanter and stronger, than without its vision there is any evidence we are."

"The rat stops gnawing in the wood, the walls withdraw, the weight is lifted, the specters fade. Nerve-ends that stuck through your skin like bristles when you blotted the last line on your manuscript or closed the office door behind you have withdrawn into their sheaths, your pulse slows, your heart lifts. The day was not so bad as it seemed, the season has not been so bad, maybe there is sense or even promise in going on."

"When evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day's occupation that is known as the cocktail hour."

"The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole."

"Biography seemed to be no more than a high-spirited game of yanking out shirttails and setting fire to them."

"That other supreme American gift to world culture, the martini cocktail, will do only at its own hour — when darkness begins to fall from the wings of night and the heart cries out for a swift healing."

"We are a pious people but a proud one too, aware of a noble lineage and a great inheritance. Let us candidly admit that there are shameful blemishes on the American past, of which by far the worst is rum. Nevertheless, we have improved man's lot and enriched his civilization with rye, bourbon and the Martini cocktail. In all history has any other nation done so much?"

"The trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act."

"Hetæræ accompany the fine arts in association with quick money. They came to Virginia as soon as the true value of the Comstock was perceived. They constituted, no doubt, a deplorable source of gambling, pleasure and embroilment. They were not soft-spoken women, their desire was not visibly separable from the main chance, and they would have beheld Mr. Harte’s portrayal of them at Poker Flat with ribald mirth. But let them have a moment of respect. They civilized the Comstock. They drove through its streets reclining in laquered broughams, displaying to male eyes fashions as close to Paris as any then current in New York. They were, in brick houses hung with tapestries, a glamour and a romance, after the superheated caverns of the mines. They enforced a code of behavior: one might be a hard-rock man outside their curtains but in their presence one was punctilious or one was hustled away. They brought Parisian cooking to the sagebrush of Sun Mountain and they taught the West to distinguish between tarantula juice and the bouquet of wines. An elegy for their passing. The West has neglected to mention them in bronze and its genealogies avoid comment on their marriages, conspicuous or obscure, but it owes them a here acknowledged debt for civilization."

"The migration was under way. ... Its great days were just around the turn of spring — and an April restlessness, a stirring in the blood, a wind from beyond the oak openings, spoke of the prairies, the great desert, and the western sea."

"In the South, a lady’s opinions could not be more important than a drawing-room charade, an accompaniment to sillabubs and cobbler."

"You can no more keep a martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there. The proper union of gin and vermouth is a great and sudden glory; it is one of the happiest marriages on earth, and one of the shortest-lived. The fragile tie of ecstasy is broken in a few minutes, and thereafter there can be no remarriage."

"Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey."

"Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerves give to wisdom."

"Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate."

"This is the violet hour, the hour of hush and wonder, when the affections glow and valor is reborn, when the shadows deepen along the edge of the forest and we believe that, if we watch carefully, at any moment we may see the unicorn."

"Nothing can be done with people who put olives in martinis, presumably because in some desolate childhood hour someone refused them a dill pickle and so they go through life lusting for the taste of brine."

"The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. When you reach the line which marks that drop — for convenience the one hundredth meridian — you have reached the West."

"The missionaries were vortices of force thrown out in advance by the force to the eastward that was making west. They thought that they came to bring Christ but in thinking so they were deceived. They were agents of a historical energy and what they brought was the United States. The Indians had no chance. If it looked like religion it was nevertheless Manifest Destiny."

"History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance."

"The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn."

"Mr. Lincoln was telling his countrymen that the achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire, and he was telling them that Yesterday must not be permitted to Balkanize it."

"The route led through the enchanted chaos of the Arizona deserts, a country mostly of naked rock in mesas, peaks, and gashed canyons, painted tremendous colors with brushes of comet’s hair. Frequently it was a giant-cactus country — saguaro by designers of modern decoration, cholla by medieval torturers — or a country of yuccas and the yucca’s weirdest form, the Joshua tree. Sometimes it was even a grass country. And through most of the route it was a country where occasionally you could find the characteristic oasis of the Southwest, a little, hidden arroyo with something of a stream in it, choked with cottonwoods, green plants blooming only a rifle shot from desolation."

"No one will ever tell in full the heroism or the stupidity of the foreign missions, the holiness-saturated devotion of the missionaries or their invincible foolishness. There were only two agencies for the extension of civilization on a large scale, armies and missions, and in the light of history the primitives who drew the armies were much the better off. The missionary was a man glad to submerge self in a holy cause but, except in a minority so small it does not count, his dedication locked him away from reality so completely that at this distance he seems crazed if not crazy. The heathen were not people to him: they were souls."

"The nation had had two symbols of solitude, the forest and the prairies; now it had a third, the mountains."

"New England is a finished place. Its destiny is that of Florence or Venice, not Milan, while the American empire careens onward toward its unpredicted end. ... It is the first American section to be finished, to achieve stability in the conditions of its life. It is the first old civilization, the first permanent civilization in America."

"Between the amateur and the professional, ... there is a difference not only in degree but in kind. The skillful man is, within the function of his skill, a different integration, a different nervous and muscular and psychological organization. ... A tennis player or a watchmaker or an airplane pilot is an automatism but he is also criticism and wisdom."

"there used to be some degree of tolerance as Moroccans would not incriminate, condemn or judge homosexuals"

"Right now, we have not seen any long-term strategies and policies that can adapt to these situations. It is good to project the country’s future population but the main question is: What are we going to do today to solve these problems?"

"More youngsters go to the mosque and feel invested in the mission to defend Islam against disbelievers who want to destroy it and push Muslims towards fornication and deprivation"

"is due to the absence of a solid political structure to improve the standard of living in rural areas."

"What has been bothering me for the last 20 years is to see families getting more and more nuclearised because they have to adapt to the changing lifestyle"

"Before, it was the children who were taking care of their parents but now it’s the other way round because of the current economic climate that is making it difficult for children to quit their parents’ house at an early age"

"Consequently, the cities will find themselves unable to accom­modate the increasing number of country people who are likely to live in substandard housing, which will in turn exacerbate poverty and crime and place considerable strain on their infrastructure, especially schools and hospitals"

"There is a lack of leisure places where the elderly can spend their time. It is heartbreaking to see old men playing checkers with a piece of cardboard and stones in the streets. This will adversely affect their dignity and make them feel marginalised in their own society, which will backfire on their fami­lies"

"We are going to reach a stage in which the government will not be able to pay pensions because there will be a minority (workforce) work­ing for a majority (pensioners)"

"We know very well that pensions are ridiculous and that not all the population has pension rights and medical coverage"

"We will end up with an ageing population in rural areas because of the youth’s exodus"

"The rural flow is so important that it has surpassed the creation of housing despite the extraordi­nary policy of social housing"

"When I travelled in the most re­mote areas in Morocco, I asked the youth about their dream and the an­swer was to leave the countryside"

"In Berlin the situation is serious but not desperate; in Vienna, the situation is desperate but not serious."

"I have no doubt that once peace is attained in the Middle East, the struggle for the advancement of women and their equality will assume a high priority in our society, and become a subject of cooperation among women in the whole region."

"As I have become involved with the rights of all groups living in Israel, I’ve become more involved with women’s rights, too. Still, I think that women who are involved only in women’s rights are missing the point."

"we have a macho, male society which is not only engaged militarily but is dominated by male tradition religiously and sociologically...Women need to be represented in politics, in lobbying, need to try to achieve legislation. We need to get more women into politics and into the Knesset."

"I finished working, satisfied with my new role as a victim, feeling slightly sorry for myself, somehow heroic. I wasn't just anybody, I was a betrayed woman. (chapter 4)"

"(How do you advise women who want to be part of the system making changes in present-day Israel? What can you say to women who want to enter politics?) YD: They have to work within the party system — every party — and on the national level with other parties. It cannot be only an effort within the party. The power of women has to be expressed by sheer numbers. It must be mobilization — whether it’s academic or grassroots."

"The country woke up on October 24, 1973, a Wednesday, as if it were a wedding day. Cease-fire was expected at any moment, and the words, "The war is over," though not yet uttered by anybody, were ringing in every heart. (beginning of chapter 7)"

"We started as a society of immigrants; the Palestinians started as people on their land. They’ve expected their state to be delivered to them by outside forces; we had to do it ourselves, and so on down the line. There is no comparison, neither in the time element nor in the content. The point is that they are not going to wait for 2,000 years to have a homeland. Where they are now is where we were before, and the way we demanded and got our rights, they deserve just as much."

"Nothing will be the same now. I have looked at cessation of life, destruction of matter, sorrow of destroyers, agony of the victorious, and it had to leave a mark."