Italicized Writing Quotes

. . . that the State is, or ought to be, founded on contract." This would be true if the words which I have italicized should be omitted. It was the insertion of these words that furnished the writer a basis for his otherwise groundless analogy between the Anarchists and the followers of Rousseau. The latter hold that the State originated in a contract, and that the people of to-day, though they did not make it, are bound by it. The Anarchists, on the contrary, deny that any such contract was ever made; declare that, had one ever been made, it could not impose a shadow of obligation on those who had no hand in making it; and claim the right to contract for themselves as they please. The position that a man may make his own contracts, far from being analogous to that which makes him subject to contracts made by others, is its direct antithesis.

Old Man Eating Alone in a Chinese Restaurant I am glad I resisted the temptation, if it was a temptation when I was young, to write a poem about an old man eating alone at a corner table in a Chinese restaurant. I would have gotten it all wrong thinking: the poor bastard, not a friend in the world and with only a book for a companion. He’ll probably pay the bill out of a change purse. So glad I waited all these decades to record how hot and sour the hot and sour soup is here at Chang’s this afternoon and how cold the Chinese beer in a frosted glass. And my book—José Saramago’s Blindness as it turns out—is so absorbing that I look up from its escalating horrors only when I am stunned by one of its arresting sentences. And I should mention the light which falls through the big windows this time of day italicizing everything it touches—the plates and tea pots, the immaculate tablecloths, as well as the soft brown hair of the waitress in the white blouse and short black skirt, the one who is smiling now as she bears a cup of rice and shredded beef with garlic to my favorite table in the corner.

Chapter Seven The Franciscan Genius: The Integration of the Negative You can show your love to others by not wishing that they should be better Christians.88 —Francis of Assisi We must bear patiently not being good…and not being thought good.89 —Francis of Assisi Yes, you read the quotes above correctly. The first quote was considered so untrue, so impossible that Francis would write such a thing, that for centuries we deleted the “not” in the text! In the second quote, the point seems to have largely been ignored or denied until the very same thing was taught by a later female doctor of the Church, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, in the nineteenth century. Maybe you would have automatically deleted the “nots” yourself, as I would have, which is why I italicized them.

Throughout Indian history, the thoughts of Muslim women have been ignored, overlooked, regarded with a sense of being ahead of this time, or out of place. This is the conundrum of being invisible, and very much seen. I italicize non-English words because they look more beautiful that way. Since we can’t honor the beauty of their own script and still be legible to most readers of English, I want to give the words their own space. Some think of italics as othering, but I am Other when I speak my mother language. Words in Bangla or Arabic or Urdu have their own weight separate from English. America took my first language, mother language, gave me my life language. I don’t recall the feeling of my first language fading as I learned the language I write, love, and fight in best.

1. Focus on the long term. “It’s All About the Long Term,” he said in the italicized initial headline in his first shareholder letter in 1997. “We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions.” Focusing on the long term allows the interests of your customers, who want better and faster services cheaper, and the interests of your shareholders, who want a return on investment, to come into alignment. That’s not always true in the short term.