Word: sentient
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...read only his own stuff he'd be one of the best-read people I know. But he's as insatiable a reader as he is a writer. The time he's spent watching movies, and thinking and writing about them, is only a sensible portion of his sentient life. He seems to have consumed every English-language novel written in the 19th century, and many from the centuries before and after. And somehow he retains it all. He has a memory that's both photographic (enabling him to recall virtually every shot from every film he's seen...
...love animals,” said his translator. “I would like you to love human beings, each other, as well. As sentient beings we all want happiness...
...whom there is no self actually feeling anything. This was the crux of a Star Trek plot in which officials wanted to reverse-engineer Lieut. Commander Data, and a furious debate erupted as to whether this was merely dismantling a machine or snuffing out a sentient life...
...What the current hubbub over political lying ignores or drowns out is the fact that there are disabling truths, messy realities that positively stymie adequate response unless their particulars are reduced to deceptive simplicities. Every sentient human being knows this from daily experience ... Constantly hearing the truth, the cold, hard, brutal unsparing truth, from spouses, relatives, friends and colleagues is not a pleasant prospect. 'Human kind,' as T.S. Eliot wrote, 'cannot bear very much reality.' TRUTH TELLING MAKES IT POSSIBLE FOR PEOPLE TO COEXIST; A LITTLE LYING MAKES SUCH SOCIETY TOLERABLE. At what point does 'a little' become 'too much...
...literary critic rather than a novelist. Evocations of his time and place are frequently bloated with pretentious prose: "In my own consciousness I was not a child. When I was alone, not subject to the demands of the world, I had the opportunity to be the aware sentient being I knew myself to be ... As they slowly built the igloo up on an ever-decreasing circumference, I watched with a sense of the anti-material oppositeness of the thing ... Without so much as the caesura of a drawn breath I was first shouting in joy, then screaming in shock...