Introduction
The Age of Extremes (1992)
Context: My object is to understand ad explain why things turned out the way they did, and how they hang together. For anyone of my age-group who has lived through all or most of the Short Twentieth Century this is inevitably also a autobiographical endeavor. We are talking about, amplifying (and correcting) our own memories. And we are talking as men and women of a particular time and place, involved, in various ways, in its history as actors in its dramas - however insignificant our parts - as observers of our times and, not least, as people whose views of the century have been formed by what we have come to see as its crucial events.
“It's amazing the way things, apparently disconnected, hang together.”
Flowers for Algernon (1966)
Context: My most absorbing interests at the present time are etymologies of ancient languages, the newer works on the calculus of variations, and Hindu history. It's amazing the way things, apparently disconnected, hang together.
“The reasons why I do things are difficult for me to understand and difficult for me to explain.”
Another Man Essay
Source: The Dark Is Rising (1965-1977), The Dark Is Rising (1973), Chapter 6 “The Book of Gramarye” (p. 101)
“It takes less time to do a thing right than to explain why you did it wrong.”
On becoming a juvenile delinquent in “In New Memoir 'Ordinary Girls,' Jaquira Díaz Searches For Home” https://www.npr.org/2019/10/29/774306278/jaquira-d-az-on-her-memoir-ordinary-girls in NPR (2019 Oct 29)
On how library research helps her write accurately in “Caught Between Two Worlds – Diana Gabaldon Interview” https://www.scotsmagazine.com/articles/diana-gabaldon-outlander-inspiration/ in The Scots Magazine (2018 Mar 2)
Variant: It’s pathetic how we can’t live with the things we can’t understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed.
Source: Asfixia
