Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books

If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, they would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law. They would never have been born. This thought I cannot bear. I beg you to see what it is that we must save, and not to let the bigots and misogynists take it away from us again.

Neither natural beauty nor deliberately created beauty is enough to foster moral perception and discrimination. But I think it possible that early and continuous experience of aesthetic beauty may foster an expectation of order and harmony that may in turn lead to an active desire for moral clarity. I have trouble distinguishing the ethical from th

In our time of huge populations exposed continuously to reproduced voices, images, and words used for commercial and political profit, there are too many people who want to and can invent us, own us, shape and control us through seductive and powerful media.

Oh money what wonders you perform (and how rarely are you so well spent).

Reading a story, you may be told something, but you’re not being sold anything. And though you’re usually alone when you read, you are in communion with another mind.

I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination.

Reading is a means of listening. Reading is not as passive as hearing or viewing. It’s an act: you do it. You read at your pace, your own speed, not the ceaseless, incoherent, gabbling, shouting rush of the media.

The problem with all this is that your real is not my real. We don’t all perceive reality the same way. Some of us in fact do not perceive reality at all. You can definitely see that if you watch Fox News.

But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness—not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won’t move your