Amazement and astonishment express the momentary overwhelming of the mind by something beyond expectation. Amazement is an emotional response, astonishment an intellectual one.
You’ve got to remember whatever happens-it’s only life, we all get through it.
When a leader used his power over the ruled for the purpose of settling scores and inflating his self-esteem, for remaking society according to his own grand designs, class warfare and genocide ensued.
The thing we want the most is always the thing we cannot have.
There is no other rational response but happiness. Despair is a foolish squandering of precious time.
The dead are sensitive to the living. They have walked this path ahead of us and know our fears, our failings, our desperate hopes, and how much we cherish what cannot last. They pity us, I think, and no doubt they should.
What matters is the day at hand and what we do with it, one day at a time, some butter-side-down days, some butter-side-up. And what should we do with the day?
We get only one life. We shouldn’t waste a day of it in anger.
He had the raw, rough voice of one who had marinated his larynx in whiskey and slow-cooked it in years of cigarette smoke.
The bloody-minded murder those whom they envy, and for what they covet.
I think to myself, I play to myself, and nobody knows what I say to myself.
To know grief, we must be in the river of time, because grief thrives in the present and promises to be with us in the future until the end point. Only time conquers time and its burdens. There is no grief before or after time, which is all the consolation we should need.
I feel like I’ve been sliding all day.
Faith is a kind of love, you know. Love of what is unseen but certain. Love makes us strong and brave.
Everyone thinks his family is strange,” Del said, scratching Scootie behind the ears, “but it’s just that... because we’re closer to the people we love, we tend to see them through a magnifying glass, through a thicker lens of emotion, and we exaggerate their eccentricities.
Sleep is a kind of peace, and I have not yet earned peace.
The life of a seamstress is no smaller than the life of a queen, the life of a child with Down syndrome no less filled with promise than the life of a philosopher, because the only significant measure of your life is the positive effect you have on others, either by conscious acts of will or by unconscious example.
Under her restlessness and licentious pose is a repressed wholesomeness that will always make her regret devaluing herself, which, even in these strange times, he believes is true of more people than not. “Veronica,” she says, referring to another waitress, “says you look dangerous. But the girl has zero spirit of adventure.” “Good for her,” Nameless says. “Girls who.
In our lives, we come to moments of great significance that we fail to recognise, the meaning of which sometimes does not occur to us for many years.
There is no fate, only free will, and we were just in the way of other people’s free will when they decided to do the Devil’s work. People are doing the Devil’s work everywhere you go; there’s no avoiding it unless you go live on a mountaintop somewhere, a hundred miles from everyone.