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Saturday

11/29/2014

Great minds may have cold hearts. Form but no color. It is an incompleteness. And so they are afraid of any woman who both thinks and feels deeply.
--Sena Jeter Naslund, Ahab's Wife, or The Star-Gazer

It's not true that your life flashes before your eyes when you die. At least, not all of it. Some of your life might flash. Other portions of your life it might take you years and years to recall. That, I think, is the function of Hell: It's a place of remembering. Beyond that, the purpose of Hell is not so much to forget the details of our lives as it is to forgive them.
--Chuck Palahniuk, Damned

The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
--Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

Friday

11/28/2014

Another day of greatest hits.

He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.
--Cormac McCarthy, The Road

We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so.
--Michael Cunningham, The Hours

Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said, "God, I love you" and looked to the sky and really meant it. "I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other." To the children and the innocent it's all the same.
--Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

Thursday

11/27/2014

I'm pretty sure I have posted these before, but it's worth it to choose them again.

Some boys walk by and you cry, seeing them. They feel good, they look good, they are good. Oh, they're not above peeing off a bridge, or stealing an occasional dime-store pencil sharpener; it's not that. It's just, you know, seeing them pass, that's how they'll be all their life; they'll get hit, hurt, cut, bruised, and always wonder why, why does it happen? how can it happen to them?
--Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind.
--Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance - for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light .... Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don't have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it? .... Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave - that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.
--Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Wednesday

11/26/2014

War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.
--William Faulkner, Fable

I think I am ready for that. I think I am ready to be met.
--Anne Enright, The Gathering

“What do you think I'm going to do?" she asked him.
"Whatever it is," he answered, "I think you'll be terrified when it happens. Don't let that stop you.”
--Kevin Wilson, The Family Fang

Tuesday

11/25/2014

Closing my eyes doesn't help. Fire burns brighter in the darkness.
--Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay

So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.
--Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

She felt as if things were moving past her as she lay stretched on the bed under the single sheet. But it’s not landscape any longer, she thought; it’s people’s lives, their changing lives.
--Virginia Woolf, The Years

Friday

11/21/2014

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Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.
--Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, Or The Evening Redness In The West

We found ourselves wanting to hurry time along, which was not in the long run good for our health. Everybody was trapped in this contradiction but nobody ever dared to articulate it.
--Joshua Ferris, Then We Came To The End

Maybe it’s not, in the end, the virtues of others that so wrenches our hearts as it is the sense of almost unbearably poignant recognition when we see them at their most base, in their sorrow and gluttony and foolishness. You need the virtues, too—some sort of virtues—but we don’t care about Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina or Raskolnikov because they’re good. We care about them because they’re not admirable, because they’re us, and because great writers have forgiven them for it.
--Michael Cunningham, By NIghtfall

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Thursday

11/20/2014

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Something changed. Somewhere along the line you stopped accelerating.
--Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City

Think of it! We could have gone on longing for one another and pretending not to notice forever. This obsession with dignity can ruin your life if you let it.
--Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society

LIVE. If you live, God will live with you. If you refuse to run his risks, he'll retreat to that distant heaven and be merely a subject for philosophical speculation.
--Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides To Die

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Wednesday

11/19/2014

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I am always saying "Glad to've met you" to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.
--J.D.Salinger, Catcher In The Rye

If you love someone, you'd rather suffer the pain alone to spare them.
--Betty Smith, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

She saw death as just another wedding she wasn't invited to.
--Jess Walter, The Zero

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Tuesday

11/18/2014

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I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don't worry. It's all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don't know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It's a dream already ended. There's nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.
--Jack Kerouac, The Portable Jack Kerouac

A man was coming down the road driving a donkey piled high with firewood. In the distance the church bells had begun. The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of the claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transiencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.
--Cormac McCarthy, Cities Of The Plain

She is like all the rest of them. Whether they are seventeen or forty-seven, when they finally come to surrender completely, it's going to be in words.
--William Faulkner, Light In August

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Monday

11/17/2014

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The world is a worst case scenario and I'm afraid that all you sense is true.
--Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

Languages. Notice how they almost make sense, some of them.
--Vernor Vinge, A Deepness In The Sky

Here I am looking at my lovely ten-year-old daughter, Maggie, in her white dress, singing Protestant hymns with the choir at the Plymouth Church of the Brethren when I should be at Mass praying for the repose of the soul of my mother, Angela McCourt, mother of seven, believer, sinner, though when I contemplate her seventy-three years on this earth I can’t believe the Lord God Almighty on His throne would even dream of consigning her to the flames. A God like that wouldn’t deserve the time of day.
--Frank McCourt, 'Tis

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