It was a failure, in the end, of imagination and fellow feeling - a failure to imagine how it felt to be living and trapped in Rwanda at that particular moment in time.
One of her first targets, in a widely circulated 1998 essay, "The End of Imagination," was the nuclear tests India carried out that year.
To Arundhati Roy, who wrote the bestselling novel, "The God of Small Things", that threat marks "The End of Imagination", the title of her lament this month in Frontline, a fortnightly magazine.
Call it the end of childhood, call it the end of innocence, call it the end of imagination.
The idea that I could do anything ran rampant, restricted by the ends of my imagination, which seemed to test its own boundaries day by day.
Vendler cites the phonemic repetition in this passage about inertia from Stevens's "Plain Sense of Things": "We had come to an end of the imagination, / Inanimate in an inert savoir".
His accompaniment to Tristan's third-act monologue, which seemed as if it would never end, was a model of imagination, tact and wonderfully refined orchestral playing, though for once one wished the customary cut in that music had been observed.
LONDON — The year ends with one small leap of imagination in Spain drawing denials and high umbrage from the sheikhs of Abu Dhabi.
"Imagination must, of course, select and arrange reality," Philip Larkin wrote in an equivocal review of the 10th volume, "Books Do Furnish a Room" (1971), "but it must be for imaginative ends: all too often the role of imagination in this sequence is to funny-up events and people whose only significance... is that Powell has experienced them".
I puzzled over this for a while, thinking I'd missed something, but in the end it comes down to feebleness of imagination.
In the end, he was more a creation of imagination than a real presence - and for a few months that summer he mattered more to me than any other sportsman as he spun Lancashire so close to a title that eluded them then, and has continued to elude them ever since.
