Every day we make our way through a moral forest, along pathways ever branching. Often we get lost.
I’d always had an ear for beauty, and maybe I’d had an eye for it as well, but until that day, I’d not recognized that the truth in great music could be found also in great art, that the heart could be lifted and the mind sharpened equally by both.
Not everything that happens during the day is an open portending a good or evil development in the future, but everything has meaning to one degree or another, for the world is an ever-weaving tapestry from which no thread can be pulled without destroying the integrity of the cloth.
My instinct is a winning coach, and when it said “Batter up,“I didn’t argue that I wasn’t ready for the game. I gripped the bat in both hands, assumed the stance, and said a prayer to Mickey Mantle.
We are the most alive and closest to the meaning of existence when we are most vulnerable, when experience has humbled us and has cured the arrogance which, like a form of deafness, prevents us from hearing the lessons that this world teaches.
The ineffable would not be ineffable if it could be described.
Some big guys, they think struttin’ the muscle will put your tail between your legs, but all they got is strut, they ain’t got the guts to back up the brag.
No offense intended to the satanists who might be reading this, but I have found that those who worship the devil tend to be sneaky, more deceitful by far than your average Methodist – and proud of it.
Freud would have had a grand time analyzing my have-to-die-clean complex. But then Freud was an ass.
Do not doubt the beauty of your heart.
She’d been living in a prison since the day she’d been born, even after leaving her mother, a prison of fear and shame and lowered expectations, and she’d been so accustomed to her circumscribed life that she had not recognized the bars.
I suspected eccentricity was often if not always a response to pain, a defense mechanism against anguish and torment and sorrow.
The source of magic in this world is more mysterious than all the explanations that sorcerers and wizards have given for it, and it is more prevalent than can be understood by those who live according to the constricted form of reason so prevalent in our time.
Life would be easy if common sense ruled; but sometimes the easy way doesn’t feel like the right way.
To generations of the willfully blind, true beauty can remain unseen in plain sight, but beauty sooner or later asserts itself – always, always, always – and is at last recognized, because there’s so damn little of it.
I am amazed that there are still nights when I sleep well.
I was like a thought slipping through the fissures...
There is in me a darkness that, by darkness challenged, will rise up and have its way.
It was a terrible thing when death first entered the world, and even now when it’s the way of nature, it’s terrible beyond words. Whether it comes for your mother by her own hands or for a stranger who can say nothing in defense of himself except that his watch is solid gold, standing witness to death leaves you desolate – Addison Goldheart pg. 116.
When I noticed that some of the gray-haired ladies had tears in their eyes, 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.