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In woman's love there is injustice and blindness towards all she does not love. And even in the knowing love of a woman there is still surprise attack and lightning and night along with the light.
Woman is not yet capable of friendship: women are still cats and birds. Or at best, cows.
Woman is not yet capable of friendship. But tell me, you men, who among you is capable of friendship?
Oh your poverty, you men, and the meanness of your souls! As much as you give to your friend I will give even to my enemy, and will not have grown poorer in doing so.
There is comradeship: may there be friendship!

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

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I saw that Menelaus only wore one, so that his hands looked naked for a man of standing.
"What are you thinking?" he finally said.
I was startled at his directness. "I was wondering about your ring," I admitted. "That you only wear one."
He laughed and held up his hand. "I need my hands to be free, not weighed down, even with gold."
"What is on it, then? What does it show?" I could see it was incised with figures.
He pulled it off and gave it to me. In the deep hollows of the oval I could barely make out two dogs flanking a curved object. Their heads arched toward the edges of the oval, making a graceful half circle. As I turned the ring to catch the carvings in the dull light, I realised how thick it was and how much gold it held. The House of Atreus was rich; in that Clytemnestra made a good match. Zeus gave power to the House of Aeacus, wisdom to the House of Amythaon, but wealth to the House of Atreus: I had heard that saying from Father's lips.

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Believing a given proposition is a matter of believing that it faithfully represents some state of the world, and this fact yields some immediate insights into the standard by which our beliefs should function. In particular, it reveals why we cannot help but value evidence and demand that propsitions about the world logically cohere. These constraints apply equally to matters of religion. "Freedom of Belief" (in anything but the legal sense) is a myth. We will see that we are no more free to believe whatever we want about God than we are free to adopt unjustified beliefs about science or history, or or free to mean whatever we want when using words like "poison" or "north" or "zero". Anyone who would lay claim to such entitlements should not be surprised when the rest of us stop listening to him.

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Environment means something. People who aren't heard, for instance, tend to speak louder, or to shut up entirely. But you should write to discover or uncover the environment and the tensions within it. Don't assume that the lower-middle-class family in which both parents work and are frazzled by debt is the spot where a child's voice might go unheard. Write to create a convincing circumstance and you might find that children go unheard in Martha's Vineyard just as they do in Tupelo. The idea is this: Don't get sociological when shaping a character's voice. Don't make presumptions as a writer about the way these environments work. There is nothing more icily calculated than a character whose words are used by the writer to poke at a social problem. Characters should speak, but only when they must, rather than when the writer needs them to.

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