“... sigh twice.Balthus sighs and lies about it, claiming it was Byron’s sigh.        A sigh may come too late.               Is it better than screaming.                  Give me all your sighs for four or five dollars.                                A sigh is ...”

“... maul?Who will you defend?Its water-processed flour makes         a regional famine food.It may be used to send a code,a kind of cuneiform         rolled on a page across dirt. It may be burntbut will not keep you warm.Speckled, bruised, unopened, dried out enough         so that its ends proceedto hold its ...”

“... I hope you may have an electrical absence, as life never loses its startlingness, however assailed. Emily Dickinson, letter to J.K. Chickering, autumn 1882 1. Technologies – are not abrupt – Though Pole-vaults may appear – The lever bends a longer spell Than Morals – in a Fire And clatters off the Bar before It ever clears the way – And makes the Mass – astonished – cheer A bruised inverted Thigh 2 ...”

“... helps People leave this world won’t. If you’re that medicated and out of it and desperate, You may not be thinking right about wanting to end your life. If you’re near death, you may be too near For the clinic to help you over the barrier. She weakly screams she wants to die. Hard to believe her pain is beyond the ...”

“... My hand is warm Enough to write DECEASED on those I led. Dearest of Mothers, I Begin to think I may not die. The war is drawing to a close, My own sweet Mother. Monday’s dead May be the last. That crimson stain Has turned to sepia.                     I remain Ever your loving ...”

“... of Ireland and America, for instance), and ignoring the old world of genteel trade courtesies. It may have emerged in tandem with the legally defensible intellectual property rights that came into being at the beginning of the 18th century, in response to a rapidly expanding readership and a culture of inventors eager to exploit commercial ...”

“... before it was replaced in the 1920s by ‘hitchhiking’. The origins of the word are disputed. It may have built on ‘auto-hiker’, hobo slang for this new type of traveller they were forced to share the highway verges with – ‘hitch’ suggesting the hitching post of horse travel, or possibly hitching, as in joining oneself, to a vehicle. The origin of ...”

“... than posit language-transcendent entities. It is a truism that, wherever in culture and history we may find ourselves, we form our beliefs solely in view of our ‘epistemic context’: the ‘reasons and evidence’ there available to us. Stout’s position is that what we are warranted in asserting here and now is relative to that context, although he has ...”

“... really his own, not his publisher’s. When Scribners agreed to undertake the work, the editors may indeed have had very little notion of what James had in mind. What they expected, one presumes, was the removal of little errors, the replacement of an awkward phrase or two, the excision of a few redundant words. The author’s only writing task would be the ...”

“... grounds that anything which throws light on Dickens’s art is justified, however faint that light may be. But it looks very like keyhole-peeping. One of Tomalin’s achievements is that she investigates the private recesses of Dickens’s life without prurience and without making the reader feel prurient. One comes away with a sense that justice has at last ...”

“... knows that a good deal remains; what it is that remains – that is his secret, his joke, as one may say.’ It’s not a secret now, and perhaps not much of a joke. But James would have been pleased to enter this literary monument, and to accept the re-bestowed national identity. In spite of appearances (he left America in 1875, when he was 32; he was ...”

“... our estimation of past glories, the recent declension does not appear so humiliating; a wry balm may thus be found by deprecating our past. Moreover, if the 19th-century economic achievement is downgraded, so, too, must be the liberal economic philosophy to which so much credit for economic success used to be given. Such an argument suggests that in the ...”

“... admirable characteristics. No one esteems anyone else simply for being possessive, even if they may envy the power which some accumulate under the goading of their will to possess, or may enjoy and admire the skills which others develop at least partly under the same impulses. To own, to have at one’s disposal, to ...”

“... haunt of the gods. The power of its finished form is now perhaps beyond imagination: but it may be doubted whether even the vast chryselephantine statue of Athene which it housed – and which was, by all accounts, incomparable in its vulgarity – added any awfulness to the place. The museum visitor who contemplates a marble Aphrodite ...”

“... love shows its face in country hotels, pleasant places, set down beside a stretch of water. Klima may perhaps be a common name in Czechoslovakia, and Kundera has become a common name in the conversation of Western readers, who are drawn to these reciprocal concerns of his. The free world may like him both for having ...”