Sometimes you need to let things strike your heart and not your head.
No sword shall touch you. Unless it be mine.” – Anonymous, lover’s oath.
But when I look out at it I think, well, it’s going to take us all one of these days, whoever we are: mad bastards, lovers, drunkards, it’s not going to pick and choose. We’ll all go to nothing sooner or later. And you know, maybe it’s my age, but that doesn’t worry me any longer. We all have our time, and when it’s over, it’s over.
Who in their right minds would trust someone who made a profession out of poking around in sick people?
Yes, he knew his face was finely made, his forehead broad, his gaze haunting, his lips sculpted so that even a sneer looked fetching on them, but he needed a living mirror to tell him so.
Was that what made him a European? To want to have his story told once more, passed down the line to another eager listener who would, in his time, disregard its lesson and repeat his own suffering? Ah, how he loved tradition.
I feel things other people don’t. I don’t think it’s particularly clever of me, or anything like that. I just do it.
You leave marks on people, Gentle. That’s a responsibility you can’t just shrug off.
Somebody’s voice rose in prayer, another simply sobbed. What grief was this? Not his passing, surely. He was too minor to earn such lamentation.
Experience was made up of endless ambiguities – of motive, of feeling, of cause and effect – and if he was to win under such circumstances, he had to understand how those ambiguities worked.
Every moment she wasted saying No to what she KNEW, was a moment lost to comprehension. That her worldview couldn’t contain such a mystery without shattering was its liability, and a problem for another day.
You know, as a child I thought somebody came and took the world away in the night and then came back and unrolled it all again the following morning.
Imagination was true power: it worked transformations wealth and influence never could.
With Floyd we had three hundred and ninety-eight years between us. All that bitter experience,” he said, “and not one of us wise.
Every man is his own Mephistopheles, don’t you think? If I hadn’t come along you’d have made a bargain with some other power. And you would have had your fortune, and your women, and your strawberries. All those torments I’ve made you suffer.
I wanted to be gone forever from being and knowing, which are the pieces of.
He told me he loved me, Clem.’ Oh Lord.’ ‘And I believed him.’ ‘How many dozens of men have told you that?’ ‘Yes, but he was different ‘Famous last words.
The Deluge wasn’t a wave, was it? It was blind men with axes; it was the great on their knees begging not to die at the hands of idiots; it was the itch of the irrational grown to an epidemic.
The Hell Priest had begun to utter what sounded like a cross between a chant and an equation: numbers and words intertwined.
Everybody is a book of blood; Wherever we’re opened, we’re red. The Book of Blood The dead have highways.