I live lies because I cannot endure the weakness of anger, and I cannot admit the irrationality of love.
The finest thing under the sun and moon is the human soul. I marvel at the small miracles of kindness that pass between humans, I marvel at the growth of conscience, at the persistence of reason in the face of all superstition or despair. I marvel at human endurance.
I am in love with you’, I responded. He laughed the most beguiling and gentle laugh. ‘Of course you are,’ he replied. ‘I understand perfectly because I’m in love with myself. The fact that I’m not transfixed in front of the nearest mirror takes a great deal of self-control.’ It was my turn to laugh.
There are too many other inexplicable things around us – horrors, threats, mysteries that draw you in and then inevitably disenchant you. Back to the predictable and humdrum. The prince is never going to come, everybody knows that; and maybe Sleeping Beauty’s dead.
When you find out there is no ultimate good and evil in which you can place your faith, the world does not fall apart at the seams. It simply means that every decision is more difficult, more critical, because you are creating the good and evil yourself and they are very real.
I don’t believe in anything, Mother,” I said. “You told Armand long ago that you believe you’ll find answers in the great jungles and forests; that the stars will finally reveal a vast truth. But I don’t believe in anything. And that makes me stronger than you think.
That is the crowning evil, that we can even go so far as to love each other, you and I. And who else would show us a particle of love, a particle of compassion or mercy? Who else, knowing us as we know each other, could do anything but destroy us? Yet we can love each other.
Let the spirits witness: for theirs is the knowledge of the future – both what it would be, and what I will: You are the Queen of the Damned, that’s what you are! Evil is your only destiny. But at your greatest hour, it is I who will defeat you. Look well on my face. It is I who will bring you down.
Phil was mumbling that Reuben might become a writer after all and writers had a way of “redeeming everything that ever happens to them.
Pamper the mad man.
I tell you, we would be hard put to determine what is more evil – religion or the pure idea. The intervention of the supernatural or the elegant abstract solution! Both have bathed this earth in suffering; both have brought the human race literally and figuratively to its knees.
Some mysteries are simply irresistible,” she said. “They have components that alter a life.
No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don’t you think? The young are eternally desperate,” he said frankly. “And books, they offer hope – that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe one is saved.
I saw these men and knew what they wanted, that this was vice, and despicable, and the price of it was Hell.
Of course the moment I saw the books, I was overcome with pleasure. This always happens with me. I feel foolishly safe with books which can be a mistake.
We’re going to die and not even know. We’ll never know, and all this meaninglessness will just go on and on and on. And we won’t any longer be witnesses to it. We won’t have even that little bit of power to give meaning to it in our minds. We’ll just be gone, dead, dead, dead, without ever knowing!
But even those people, cops, lawyers, doctors, learned what they learned from the aftermath. They weren’t there when the killer tore at his victim; they didn’t smell the scent of evil; they didn’t hear the cries to heaven for something, someone, to intervene.
I don’t need to sleep to play. I’m crazy anyway. Being crazier still could only help.
You understood my soul, I thought, and now others are coming only to sack my heart of all its riches. What am I to do? We argued, yes, you and I, but it was with loving respect, was it not? I cannot endure without you. Please come to me, from wherever you are.
It’s all about aesthetics, morality and aesthetics are completely similar.