He glanced from face to face, half expecting to discover that one of them was that of a stranger, a malevolent Other hiding among the infinity of diminishing Silas Kinsleys. What a curious thought.
Out of the seething crowd, out of the light and the darkness, came Blossom Rosedale, the one and only Happy Monster, which was a name that she had given herself, not because she loathed the way she looked but because she was truly happy in spite of all her suffering.
I understood for the first time why music matters so much, how it reminds us of who we are and where we came from, of all the good times and the sadness, too.
If we rely upon the tao with which we’re born, we always know what is the right thing to do in any situation, the good thing not for our bank accounts or for ourselves, but for our souls. We are tempted from the tao by self-interest, by base emotions and passions.
I hate the people who think we’re just part of the great unwashed.
There’s no middle ground in modern movies; you either save a kingdom and marry a princess or you are shot to death by assassins hired by the evil corporation that you are trying to bring to justice in the courtroom of a corrupt judge.
And your three-year-old Ford Explorer,” Terezin said, “bought without your parents’ money, a proud statement of your independence – of course it has a GPS.
We are impatient for the future and try to craft it with our own powers, but the future will come as it comes and will not be hurried. If we are good at waiting, we discover that what we wanted of the future, in our impatience, is no longer what we want, that waiting has brought wisdom.
Earlier, she asked if I would die for her. Without hesitation, I said that I would – and meant it. I don’t understand either my reaction to her or the source of her power. She is something other than she appears to be. She tells me that I already know what she is and that I only need to accept the knowledge that I already possess.
The wisdom of the most sagacious ancient Greeks, the wisdom of the most perceptive rabbis of ancient Canaan, and all the parables of Christ teach us to believe not in justice, but in truth. In a world of rampant lying, where so many lies are used to inflame passions and justify false grievances, the indiscriminate pursuit of justice leads sooner or later to insanity, mass murder, and the ruin of entire civilizations.
Laugh at tyrants and the tragedy they inflict. Such men welcome our tears as evidence of subservience, but our laughter condemns them to ignominy.
In this brave new digital world, reality is plastic, and your identity is whatever you wish it to be. As is your future: Wish it, build it, live it.
The guy at the cash register is a redhead in his thirties with freckles and a two-inch-diameter birthmark, as pink as uncooked salmon, on his pale forehead. The mark is uncannily like the image of a fetus curled in a womb, as if a gestating twin had died early in the mother’s pregnancy and left its fossilized image on the surviving brother’s brow.
Is it scarier than Jocko’s teddy bear being full of spiders waiting for bedtime so they can crawl in his ears when he sleeps and spin a web in his brain and turn him into a spider slave?
When you think about it, a lot of fundamental physics is the solemn statement of the absurdly obvious. Any drunk who has tried to put his car where a lamppost stands is a self-educated physicist.
Action. Action, shaped by intelligence and a moral perspective, is the answer to most problems.
There’s such a thing as trying too hard, he told himself. It causes constipation of the mind. But such admonishments did no good. He was still as blocked as a pipe full of concrete.
The combination of the song, the birthmark, and the cashier’s haunting gray eyes generates in Vess an eerie sense of expectancy. Something exceptional is about to happen.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I tend to do that. Any life isn’t just one story; it’s thousands of them. So when I try to tell one of my own, I sometimes go down an alleyway when I should take the main street, or if the story is fourteen blocks long, I sometimes start on block four and have to backtrack to make sense.
All of her life, Bibi had kept a governor on her anger, had consciously negotiated between the gracious, complaisant aspect of her nature and the darker part of herself that sometimes wanted to strike out, strike back. Her tendency to arbitrate herself into a courteous reaction, or at least one of quiet anger, was motivated not by a noble inclination, but by fear that she would lose control of herself.