Being in love, she concluded, is simply a presentation of our pasts to another individual, mostly packages so unwieldy that we can no longer manage the loosened strings alone.
She felt the essence of herself pulled finer and smaller like those streams of spun glass that pull and stretch till there remains but a glimmering illusion. Neither falling nor breaking, the stream spins finer. She felt herself very small and ecstatic. Alabama was in love.
I am really only myself when I'm somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination.
Don't you think I was made for you? I feel like you had me ordered - and I was delivered to you - to be worn. I want you to wear me, like a watch-charm or a buttonhole bouquet.
Youth doesn't need friends - it only needs crowds.
Mr. Fitzgerald, I believe that is how he spells his name, seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.
It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves.
Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.
I have no patience for those in the American Jewish community who just go around slandering people as anti-Semites without realizing that what they're doing is really trivializing anti-Semitism.
There are major disappointments with the outcomes of Solidarity: corruption, and major pockets of economic backwardness and even poverty. By and large, though, if there were a choice between the life Poles led in the 1970s and 1980s and now, nobody but a lunatic would say they wanted to have back what they had before.
Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.
The fact is that one significant way the Iranians have a posture different from the North Koreans, the North Koreans basically are saying we have a nuclear program. We are seeking weapons. We have produced weapons. We're proud of the fact that we have weapons.
I think the US has the right to have its own national security policy. I think most Americans would agree with that. And therefore clarity on this issue is important and especially if we commit ourselves, explicitly and bindingly, to Israel's security.
Once the Eastern Bloc collapsed, what I call 'historical spontaneity' prevailed and the countries that were subject to Soviet control naturally gravitated to the West. That's where they sought their security; I don't think there was a way to avoid that. If we tried to exclude them, we would have today not one Europe, we would have three Europes: one in the West, one in the middle and one in the East, and the middle would be insecure and a tempting target. The insecurity felt [today] by Eastern Europe would be replicated on a much larger and more consequential scale.
We look a little bit disorderly, indecisive, leaderless. That's a real problem, and that's a problem that concerns me particularly on foreign affairs. The presidency, not just President Obama, but the presidency in recent years has lost some of the terrain that they used to dominate in the making of foreign policy. I think President Obama has to make a serious effort to regain it because he lost some of it himself.
Benchmarks are targets that have to be fulfilled. They cannot be fulfilled in an indefinite period of time, so there are timetables in benchmarks.
I think President George W. Bush contributed very directly to the fact that the status of America as the world's only superpower lasted for 20 years at most.
Foreign policy of a pluralistic democracy like the United States should be based on bipartisanship because bipartisanship is the means and the framework for formulating policies based on moderation and on the recognition of the complexity of the human condition. That has been the tradition since the days of Truman and Vandenberg all the way until recent times.
There is an element of paranoia in this inclination to view any serious attempt at a compromised peace as somehow directed against Israel.
Henceforth, the United States may have to determine how to cope with regional coalitions that seek to push America out of Eurasia, thereby threatening America's status as a global power.
