The thought that a non-human being had physical feelings, let alone the wherewithal to lose hope, was outlandish and alien, like thinking that paper had relatives.
In my eyeline as I recline are illustrations of 18th-century sophisticates, men who knew how to take pleasure and who weren't alien to thinking.
I love Bob Altman's work right through to "Gosford Park," but I'm thinking: "Alien"?
But Leavitt has only a single newspaper clipping as a source, he says, and he is deliberately reducing an alien way of thinking to a romantic cliché: a man who wants his lover to infect him so that both will die.
We think that we would smile at the aliens–I'm thinking of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where the aliens come out of their spaceship and the humans greet them.
Technocratic middle-aged couples who've clearly never seen the like squint sceptically at alien-faced monkfish, thinking: OK, it's not sexy, it's not Nokia or Bang & Olufsen, but at least this is a real commodity we can sell to real people, not some bit of paper shorting options on yen-linked motorhome derivatives.
The waiter was looking at me like I was an alien, and I'm thinking, 'These are fucking minging'.
All the cities of Bosnia are becoming encampments of rural refugees, whose habits and ways of thinking seem alien to Sarajevans.
I don't think it's necessarily alien to their way of thinking.
"I was thinking about aliens and the mothership, and I've been interested in beams lately with rainbows shooting out of the nipple and stuff like that," she says.
