“Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.”

The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.

Ever since the Great Depression, we know that one of the key ways in which the US economy has stimulated growth is by manufacturing weapons and exporting war to other countries.

The American people ought to know that it is not them, but their government’s policies, that are so hated.

There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.

When people say “the people” or “the public” as though it’s the final repository of all morality, I sometimes flinch.

Every people, every society, needs a culture of resistance, a culture of being difficult and disobedient, that is the only way they will ever be able to stand up to the inevitable abuse of power by whoever runs the state apparatus, the capitalists, the communists, the socialists, the Gandhians, whoever.

That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.

I am a woman who is a granddaughter of a lady who used to be beaten on the head by her husband, of a mother who went through hell because she was divorced and had to bring up these kids. And I can take 10 men out to lunch and pay the bill, and nobody even thinks twice about it. So don’t mess with me.

Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn’t matter whether we use them or not. They will destroy us either way.

The crisis of modern democracy is a profound one. Free elections, a free press and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities available on sale to the highest bidder.

How carelessly imperial power vivisected ancient civilizations. Palestine and Kashmir are imperial Britain’s festering, blood-drenched gifts to the modem world. Both are fault lines in the raging international con�icts of today.

Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.

The American way of life is not sustainable. It doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America.

You have come to a stage where you almost have to work on yourself. You know, on finding some tranquility with which to respond to these things, because I realize that the biggest risk that many of us run is beginning to get inured to the horrors.

Democracy no longer means what it was meant to. It has been taken back into the workshop. Each of its institutions has been hollowed out, and it has been returned to us as a vehicle for the free market, of the corporations. For the corporations, by the corporations.

Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds. Pity the nation that needs to jail those who ask for justice, while communal killers, mass murderers, corporate scamsters, looters, rapists, and those who prey on the poorest of the poor, roam free.

It is defeat that turns bone to flint; it is defeat that turns gristle to muscle; it is defeat that makes men invincible. Do not then be afraid of defeat. You are never so near to victory as when defeated in a good cause.

I am a spark from the Infinite. I am not flesh and bones. I am light.

I met you the way a fast car meets a tree. The slightest slip sent me careening into you. Half-conscious I remained at the scene, bones broken, blood spilled, fire burning.

Bitter sweet rose her thorns pierce every bone, but her lustful petals fall like bandaids for bleeding sores.

I have to make my bones with Hollywood to get in. And when I do maybe I’ll metamorphose from Mr. Muscles or whatever it is I am now and become an irascible tosser.

The safest and most suitable form of penance seems to be that which causes pain in the flesh but does not penetrate to the bones, that is, which causes suffering but not sickness.

Dancers have more bones than most people and on the days when you work hard you are sure that you have somehow accumulated more bones than you started with.

He was fire that crippled my bones. And you were the one who showed up out of nowhere, and carried me home.