Almost none of these very strong and patient souls sought the flesh again. But some of them had in the past. They had gone down and been reborn and discovered in the final analysis that they could not remember from one fleshly life to another, so there was no real reason to keep being born! Better to linger here, in the eternity that was known to them, and to watch the Beauty of Creation, and it did seem very beautiful to them, as it had seemed to us.
It’s the risk that fascinates, the moment of infinite possibility.
You will not feel anything. When you detonate the explosion, you will cease to be. That’s all. There is no life beyond biological life. There is no life beyond visible life.
But the time of mourning is always the perfect time for nonsense.
In the name of the cross, more injustice has been perpetrated than for any other single cause or emblem or philosophy or creed on Earth.
Music like that could hurt you. It gave you back your disappointment, and your emptiness. It said, Life can be this. Remember this.
Ah, yes, beautiful English bones.
I picture heaven as a vast library, with unlimited volumes to read. And paintings and statues to examine galore. I picture it as a great doorway to learning. Do you think the hereafter could be like that?
You see, sometimes, Alex, we have to lose things to learn compassion. And sometimes we are overcome by change that arrives with some measure of violence, but leaves us transformed for the better.
I’ll write about my past but I won’t talk about it. I’ll turn it into art if I can, but I won’t talk about it.
God kills, and so shall we...
And I would see her sweet and palpable before me, a shimmering, precious creature soon to grow old, soon to die, soon to lose these moments that in their intangibility promised to us wrongly... wrongly, an immortality. As if it were our very birthright, which we could not come to grasp the meaning of until this time of middle life when we looked on only as many years ahead as already lay behind us. When every moment, every moment must be first known and then savored.
There is no heaven. There is no hell. There is no above or below. If there is a realm beyond this one, it is no more beautiful, no more significant, no more full of truth, than ours here on earth.
Be Warned: I sleep as the earth sleeps beneath the night sky or the winter’s snow; and once awakened, I am servant to no man.
I have named them the hounds of Sisyphus.
The disparity between outward appearances and inner disposition had disturbed me all my life.
She would have been gorgeous if someone had thrown her into a waterfall and held her there for half an hour and I told her so silently.
Forget you need anyone to love you for what you are. That’s impossible. I’m afraid. I’m afraid of what you will do now. The pattern’s all too familiar.
The woman was forty-one years old, yet she looked both ancient and young – a stooped and pale child, untouched by adult worry or passion. Deirdre, did you ever have a lover? Did you ever dance in that parlor?
And we do breathe. We breathe and we taste and we smell and we feel and we thirst.