You remember what I told you,” she said as he approached the hook where she had placed his coat. “You move slowly, you do not really move like a woman, for if you moved so fast and so much as a woman, the illusion would be broken, the illusion is a complete lie. You move more slowly than a human creature, and you keep your arms close to your body.
He says things like the orchestra is generating a soul, a collective soul, an entity. I ask him what that means. He says consciousness generates soul.
If money can’t buy you the freedom to do anything you want, well, what is the good of it?
I love; therefore I am.
In the beginning were the spirits.
An artist, stealing paints from a store, for example, imagines himself to have made an inevitable but immoral decision, and then he sees himself as fallen from grace; what follows is despair and petty irresponsibility, as if morality were a great glass world which can be utterly shattered by one act.
And there persisted in her a sense of Michael’s dangerous innocence, his naivete, which seemed to her to be connected to his attitudes about evil. He understood good better than he did evil.
Did all the answers lie beyond the open door? Is the future beyond the open door? For after all, why could this not become, in spite of everything, a mere chapter of her life, marked off and seldom reread, once she had returned to the outside world where she had been kept all these years, quite beyond the spells and enchantments that were now claiming her? Oh, but it wasn’t going to be. Because when you fell prey to a spell this strong, you were never the same.
This is what love is, isn’t it? It’s not a thing for which you clear a certain space in your life. It takes over your life, and all else must be made to fit to it, or the result is endless grief or a willful numbness that results in the death of your spirit before your body. I have seen this truth in the eyes of Julie and Ramsey. And I see it in your eyes when I look at.
Out, out, brief candle.” Such comforting remembrance can turn in an instant to agony.
You long to be seen and approached and understood and to get into mischief, to stir everything up and see if it won’t boil over and if God won’t come down and grab you by the hair. Well, there is no God. You might as well be God.
Kinship. Could they guess how indescribably exotic that was after the barren, selfish world in which she’d spent her life, like a potted plant that had never seen the real sun, nor the real earth, nor heard the rain except against double-paned glass?
Who said you had to be human to have a soul? Everything that is self-conscious and capable of thought and love has a soul. The soul emanates from self-conscious. The soul is the expression of self-consciousness. The soul is generated by organized self-consciousness.
My last sunrise,’ said the vampire. ‘That morning, I was not yet a vampire. And I saw my last sunrise.
Your soul is your inner being, your thinking, reasoning, loving, choosing inner being. Your capacity to stand up for what is right. Your capacity to fight against what is wrong. Your capacity to choose even to die for what you believe is right. That’s your soul.
But there is no value to suffering!
God kills indiscriminately and so shall we. For no creatures under God are as we are none so like him as ourselves.
It is a terrible thing to realize that you depend so much upon another; that your entire sense of well-being is connected to that one – that you need him, love him, that he is the chief witness of your life.
Maybe all of life has a mind,′ she said, her eyes roving over the small room, over the empty tables. ‘Maybe the flowers watch us. Maybe the trees think and hate us that we can walk. Or maybe, just maybe they don’t care. The horror of Lasher is that he has begun to care!
Everything is coming to an end, I thought. But what does that mean? Why do I say things to myself when I don’t even know what they mean?