I like writers who can show me worlds I know nothing about, but my favorites are those who create characters or worlds which feel realistic and familiar to me, or who can make me feel inspired.
Familiar
However far back I go into my childhood, nothing seems to me more characteristic of, or more familiar in, my interior economy than the appetite or irresistible demand for some ‘Unique all-sufficing and necessary reality.’
Political biography is in the doldrums. No one wants to read 800 pages or so of cradle-to-grave dead politics, especially if it’s familiar stuff and has all been written about before.
This preparatory sort of idealism is the one that, as I just suggested, Berkeley made prominent, and, after a fashion familiar. I must state it in my own way, although one in vain seeks to attain novelty in illustrating so frequently described a view.
People are familiar with ‘the stick’ of the Tea Party… challenging incumbents, flooding the phone lines. What they’re not so much familiar with, and what I want to expand, is ‘the carrot.’ So when a Mitch McConnell, or when a Republican caucus stands firm… we have to reward them.
Political vitriol is a familiar enough characteristic of American history.
Partisans fight on familiar territory with professed political objectives to conquer power. This is what distinguishes them from terrorists.
I love the sense of looking at the sad, paltry, and yet very familiar spectacle that we must make from moment to moment in our lives, and in our frenzy, as something that’s as out there as alien life.
Familiar acts are beautiful through love.
Ordinary men live among marvels and feel no wonder, grow familiar with objects and learn nothing new about them.