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But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.

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To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the pas...more

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The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to b...more

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All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.

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The only interesting ideas are heresies

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All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.

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Every culture has its southerners -- people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, drink, sing brawl, kill their unfaithful spouses; who...more

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With genius, as with beauty -- all, well almost all, is forgiven.