books

__ When a man gets you 99, he starts to think, he may only have another 10 years of sexy lovemaking left... Still Smiling At 99. __

Having had virtually no contact with the outside world for the last few weeks, Evan had temporarily forgotten the social norms governing shopping conduct or approaching celebrities in public.

I__ just not ready to give myself up, Sammy. I mean, there__ something perfect about virginity, and I haven__ found someone who deserves to take that perfection from me___ou__e loco, Carlos. Insane. Totally crazy_ Most guys think they__e imperfect for still being virgins past the age of seventeen.

__ When a man gets to 99, he starts to think, he may only have another 10 years of sexy lovemaking left... Still Smiling At 99. __

It's only in mediocre books that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other. In real life everything gets mixed up! Don't you think you'd have to be a hopeless nonentity to play only one role all your life, to have only one place in society, always to stand for the same thing?

Almost every time I speak to teenagers, particularly young female students who want to talk to me about feminism, I find myself staggered by how much they have read, how creatively they think and how curiously bullshit-resistant they are. Because of the subjects I write about, I am often contacted by young people and I see it as a part of my job to reply to all of them - and doing so has confirmed a suspicions I__e had for some time. I think that the generation about to hit adulthood is going to be rather brilliant.Young people getting older is not, in itself, a fascinating new cultural trend. Nonetheless the encroaching adulthood and the people who grew up in a world where expanding technological access collided with the collapse of the neoliberal economic consensus is worth paying attention to. Because these kids are smart, cynical and resilient, and I don__ mind saying that they scare me a little.

You are either in a state of perfection or a state of learning. Reading is one of the best ways to learn about our lives and purpose!

Six men control almost all the media in the United States--book publishing, magazines, television, movie studios, newspapers, and radio. They are not friendly toward feminism, which has almost disappeared from the surface of our society. You will almost never see a feminist column on an op-ed page, a feminist article in a magazine, or newspaper, actual (not satirized) feminist ideas on television or in the movies. Only magazines & radio controlled by feminists--and these are few and not well-funded--offer information on the feminist perspective.This might be understandable if feminism were a wild-eyed manic philosophy. But it is a belief, a politics, based on one simple fact: women are human beings who matter as much as men. That is all that feminism claims. As human beings, women have the right to control their own bodies, to walk freely in the world, to train their minds and bodies, and to love and hate at will. Only those who wish to continue to coerce women into a servant/slave class for men cannot accept this principle.

Evan ran his finger across the faded leather spines. He laughed at how silly some of the names were: Paint Your Roses Red, Edelweiss and Me, World of Mushrooms and Fungi, The Toadstool Diaries, Daffodils Unseen and Exotic Plants Unleashed, to name but a few.

Humans like stories. Humans need stories. Stories are good. Stories work. Story clarifies and captures the essence of the human spirit. Story, in all its forms__f life, of love, of knowledge__as traced the upward surge of mankind. And story, you mark my words, will be with the last human to draw breath.

I liked reading biographies of writers, even if (as was the case with Monsieur Rabelais)I'd never read any of their actual writing. I flipped to the back and found the highlighted quote ("NEVER USE A HIGHLIGHTER IN MY BOOKS,

I read nonfiction."She reared back as if offended.

Fiction is just that__iction. Yes, it is serious business, but it should also be taken for face value. It__ entertainment. It__ escapism. It__ 365 pages of relaxation.

I didn't even notice that my shoes were full of mud by the time I reached the rocky shore. There was ragged yellow police tape tied to some branches, dancing in the wind. It was as if the tape was waving, welcoming me back to place where I would have died.

The instruction here is not for every kind of writer - not for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi - though it is true that what holds for the most serious kind of fiction will generally hold for junk fiction as well. (Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind. Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer. The most elegant techniques in the world, filtered through a junk mind, become elegant junk techniques.)

Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open - the only way to stop the story from running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.

As I lay there watching Robin sleep beside me, I realized that she was right all along. I didn__ need to live in a castle _ a shack in the woods with her would do just fine. And for that matter, I didn__ need to be prince of the ocean either, because with her by my side_ I was king of the pond.

We read novels because we need stories; we crave them; we can__ live without telling them and hearing them. Stories are how we make sense of our lives and of the world. When we__e distressed and go to therapy, our therapist__ job is to help us tell our story. Life doesn__ come with plots; it__ messy and chaotic; life is one damn, inexplicable thing after another. And we can__ have that. We insist on meaning. And so we tell stories so that our lives make sense.