What can you do. You get a name, you're called 'Thomas Bernhard', and it stays that way for the rest of your life. And if at some point you go for a walk in the woods, and someone takes a photo of you, then for the next eighty years you're always walking in the woods. There's nothing you can do about it.

What can you do, playing against eleven goalposts? 

(after 0-0 draw at Anfield).

What can you do with it? It's like a lot of yaks jumping about.

What can you do to promote world peace? Go home and love your family.

What can you do right now to turn your life around? Gratitude.

What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss -- absolute bliss -- as though you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle into every finger and toe?.

What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss -- absolute bliss -- as though you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle into every finger and toe?

What can you do if they have slapped you with a legal notice? You have to reply. For all you know, they have taken you to jail or something.

What can you do if a part of it is uphill? You can't work out another route. You've just got to run the one they give you. But they tell me London is a nice course. Even the cobbles, I hope, are not very much of a problem for me.

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains, and studying night and day how to fly? ... wearying himself with climbing upon every ascent, ... bruising himself with continual falls, and at last breaking his neck? And all this, from an imagination that it would be glorious to have the eyes of people looking up at him, and mighty happy to eat, and drink, and sleep, at the top of the highest trees in the kingdom.

What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains, and studying night and day how to fly?

What can you answer? Now be careful, don't arouse my spite, Or with my slipper I'll take you napping,
faces slapping
Left and right.

What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds? In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping.

What can we take on trust in this uncertain life? Happiness, greatness, pride -- nothing is secure, nothing keeps.

What can we say about a marketing culture that so openly feeds and colludes with obsession? The Disney empire has developed this to an unprecedented degree of professionalism.

What can we put into the hands of people under oppressive regimes to help them? For me, a big part of it is information, knowledge -- the ability to defeat propaganda by understanding it.

What can we make of the inexpressible joy of children? It is a kind of gratitude, I think--the gratitude of the ten-year-old who wakes to her own energy and the brisk challenge of the world. You thought you knew the place and all its routines, but you see you hadn't known. Whole stacks at the library held books devoted to things you knew nothing about. The boundary of knowledge receded, as you poked about in books, like Lake Erie's rim as you climbed its cliffs. And each area of knowledge disclosed another, and another. Knowledge wasn't a body, or a tree, but instead air, or space, or being--whatever pervaded, whatever never ended and fitted into the smallest cracks and the widest space between stars.

What can we learn from women like Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday that we may not be able to learn from Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Church Terrell? If we were beginning to appreciate the blasphemies of fictionalized blues women -- especially their outrageous politics of sexuality -- and the knowledge that might be gleaned from their lives about the possibilities of transforming gender relations within black communities, perhaps we also could benefit from a look at the artistic contributions of the original blues women.