“Mama is beautiful, I said.Mama is strong, he said. Beauty comes and goes. Strength, you keep forever.”

“WHEN I WAS VERY YOUNG, Papa used to tell me that words fly on wild winds from the mouths of sly people. When the winds pick up, he said, sand blows into your ears and bites your eyes. Storms build ...”

“Mama is beautiful,” I said.“Mama is strong,” he said. “Beauty comes and goes. Strength, you keep forever.”

“Processes of rationalization and disenchantment engender a shift from a social order founded upon value-rational beliefs and governed through charismatic and traditional forms of authority, to an o...”

“If science could comprehend all phenomena so that eventually in a thoroughly rational society human beings became as predictable as cogs in a machine, then man, driven by this need to know and asse...”

“Some third person decides your fate: this is the whole essence of bureaucracy.”

“It was four o'clock of a stickily wet Saturday. As long as it is anything from Monday to Friday the average library attendant goes around thanking her stars she isn't a school-teacher; but the last...”

“The world is quiet here.”

“I've always said, stuff the engagement ring! Just build me a really big library.”