But this animal’s unadulterated joy in being alive was like a spotlight that pierced Travis’s inner gloom and reminded him that life had a brighter side from which he had long ago turned away.
Sudden falls can come to societies that know too little history or that have furnished their minds with easy one-note propaganda in place of the true complexity and terrible beauty of the storied past.
Laughter is a balm for the afflicted, the best defense against despair, the only medicine for melancholy. -Groucho Marx.
Except for the lack of enormous insects, suffocating humidity, malaria victims groaning in death throes, poisonous vipers as thick as mosquitoes, and rabid jungle cats madly devouring their own feet, you would have sworn you were in the Amazon rainforest.
She was my sister, beloved, who had stayed in my room around the clock when I’d been eight and suffered with a case of the flu that nearly killed me. She was my sister, whose clarinet playing inspired me to find the music in me, to settle on the saxophone, which had fast become the key to my identity. I loved her as I loved no one else, as no others had allowed me to love them, and if I were to kill her under the influence of some malign spirit, I might as well then kill myself.
The uniqueness of every soul is not a theme that our current culture, obsessed with group identities, cares to assert. But Henry was himself and no one else, and judging by.
Between a man and woman in love, no lie is small or harmless.
In certain fiction, she perceives truths that she rarely finds in nonfiction; therefore, in her quest to better understand the world and the meaning of her life, she reads those novels that suggest a world of wonders, dark and light, forever unfolding for eyes willing to see.
Over the centuries, the Miriams and the Bernies and the millions like them were the fonts of free and civil societies, which was why the likes of D. J. Michael so despised them and yearned to oppress them; freedom and civility were barriers to absolute power and to the adoration that the powerful could command of others.
If you really truly want to know, I’ve thought if I was ever free someday, I might discover I’ve held my tears so long that I can’t cry anymore, that I’m a dry stone and nothing can ever be wrung from me.
Then the clarifying thing happens, and what you need to do, what you must do, is not a question, not demand more revelation than what is given, be quiet in the face of it, quiet and grateful that it has been given to you to see this, to be for even a short time aware of the extraordinary layered depths and profound beauty of the world to which we mostly blind ourselves.
Ah, sir, that’s just mean. She’s not a Victoria’s Secret model, but she’s pretty in her way.
Every human face is more enigmatic than the timeworn expression on the famous Sphinx out there in the sands of Egypt.
Is this not pathetic, Odd, what some ill-educated fool has done? I take solace in reminding myself that ‘art is long and critics are the insects of a day.’” “Shakespeare?” I asked. “No. Randall Jarrell. A wonderful poet, now all but forgotten because modern universities teach nothing but self-esteem and toe-sucking.
Haven’t you noticed, insanity is the new normal?
A sixth sense is a miraculous thing, which in itself suggests a supernatural order. The human intellect, however, for all its power and triumphs, is largely formed by this world and is therefore corruptible.
Only the human monster knew beauty and rejected it, knew truth and disdained it, knew peace and did not prefer it, unlike the tiger and the wolf who knew not.
Then perhaps you shouldn’t sleep. The imagination has terrifying power.
Any town can die without actually drying up and blowing away. It can be as dead as a ghost town even with people still living in it.” Gazing.
In twenty-one years, I have not considered changing to Todd. The bizarre course of my life suggests that Odd is more suited to me, whether it was conferred by my parents with intention or fate.