In Britain a child rescued by firemen sneaked back into the burning house to watch the end of the TV show he was watching.

"I have laid too many eggs in the hot sands of this wilderness, the world, with ostrich carelessness and ostrich oblivion..." --Coleridge, Biographica Litteraria ch. II

"[Poetry] is at all times the proper food of the understanding; but in an age of corrupt eloquence it is both food and antidote. In prose I doubt whether it be even possible to preserve our style wholly unalloyed by the vicious phraseology which meets us everywhere, from the sermon to the newspaper, from the harangue of the legislator to the speech from the convivial chair, announcing a toast or sentiment. Our chains rattle, even while while we are complaining of them. The poems of Boetius rise high in our estimation when we compare them with those of his contemporaries, as Sidonius Apollinarius, &c. They might even be referred to a purer age, but that the prose, in which they are set, as jewels in a crown of lead or iron, betrays the true age of the writer." --ibid, ch. XXII

Limitations are mostly only steep learning gradients, but what we lack is an appetite for the difficult. Much of my life so far has been passed in developing such an appetite. Only, i'm like a soldier who only fights in duels: i don't regard just any challenge as addressed to me--my honor or something like it, has to be impugned. Job-hunting does not give the Lie, it merely bores the shit out of me...

"The writer is a meticulous self-cleaning object, always scraping the grime of certainty from his perception." --Andrei Codrescu, In America's Shoes