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- Wind, Sand and Stars // Antoine de Saint-Exupery
- What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it.
- He senses as never before his own nobility and crushes me beneath his contempt; for he is to ride against Bonnafous, he is to move at dawn impelled by a hatred that bears all the signs of love.
- I thought of our respect for the dead. I thought of the white sanitarium where the light of a man's life goes quietly out in the presence of those who love him and who garner as if it were an inestimable treasure his words, his ultimate smile. How right they are! Seeing that this same whole is never again to take shape in the world. Never again will be heard exactly that note of laughter, that intonation of voice, that quality of repartee. Each individual is a miracle. No wonder we go on speaking of the dead for twenty years.
- East of Eden // John Steinbeck
- The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels. The sectarian churches came in swinging, cocky and loud and confident. Ignoring the laws of debt and repayment, they built churches which couldn’t be paid for in a hundred years. The sects fought evil, true enough, but they also fought each other with a fine lustiness. They fought at the turn of a doctrine. Each happily believed all the others were bound for hell in a basket. And each for all its bumptiousness brought with it the same thing: the Scripture on which our ethics, our art and poetry, and our relationships are built. It took a smart man to know where the difference lay between the sects, but anyone could see what they had in common. And they brought music—maybe not the best, but the form and sense of it. And they brought conscience, or, rather, nudged the dozing conscience. They were not pure, but they had a potential of purity, like a soiled white shirt. And any man could make something pretty fine of it within himself. True enough, the Reverend Billing, when they caught up with him, turned out to be a thief, an adulterer, a libertine, and a zoophilist, but that didn’t change the fact that he had communicated some good things to a great number of receptive people.
- To Rise Again at a Decent Hour // Joshua Ferris
- I mean, it was a show, man. Love makes you noble. So what if it’s selfdirected? So what if, eventually, as love fades, we revert, like the lottery winner and limb loser alike, back to our base selves?
aug 14 2015 ∞
jul 21 2016 +
jul 21 2016 +