Gossip is instructive,” said the Wizard. “It tells which way the wind is blowing.
Chopin’s theme, a simple descending descant the first time round, articulated itself in the repeat with nuanced embellishment. It was music remembering itself. It meant something different, something more, to hear those simple phrases repeated so soon, qualified by chromatic variations. Clarifications. Not redundancy, but a hypothesis about how consolation works. A second chance at getting it. A second chance at life.
What a mystery we are to ourselves, even as we go on, learning more, sorting it out a little. The further on we go, the more meaning there is, but the less articulable. You live your life, and the older you get – the more specificity you harvest – the more precious becomes every ounce and spasm.
I just like to think about what I’m reading. Don’t you?” “I don’t read very well. So I don’t think I think very well either.” Galinda smiled. “I dress to kill, though.
Perhaps every accidental cluster of people has a short period of grace, in between an initial shyness and prejudice on the one hand and eventual repugnance and betrayal on the other.
I’m a priest, I know better than most when a lie is permitted.
Winter still comes after autumn though you may have died over the summer.
The fatal day rarely announces itself, but comes disguised as midsummer. Our private lives are like a colony of worlds expanding, contracting, breathing universal air into separate knowledges. Or like several packs of cards shuffled together by an expert anonymous hand, and dealt out in a random, amused or even hostile way.
Don’t take the advice of anyone you meet here. We’re all mad.
Sooner or later we grow into deserving our own deaths, somehow.
The day is wound up and begins even before the last haunted dreams, the last of the fog, those spectral and evanescent residues, have faded away.
The years peeled slowly off, one by one, or perhaps dozens at a time.
Perhaps he just didn’t have the feeling for faith. It seemed to be a kind of language, one whose gnarled syntax needed to be heard from birth, or it remained forever unintelligible. But he wished he had a faith now, some scrap for something: for elphaba was dead, and to act as if the world were no more changed than if some branch of a tree had snapped off- well, it didn’t seem right.
Well, your opinion is as good as hers, I think,” said Elphaba. “That’s the real power of art, I think. Not to chide but to provoke challenge. Otherwise why bother?
Given a long enough time, of course, a wide enough frame, there is nothing said or done, ever, that isn’t ironic in the end.
Listen, we’re all trapped in our own lives. You, me, everyone we’ve ever met.
The thing about a mirror is this: The one who stares into it is condemned to consider the world from her own perspective. Even a bowed mirror works primarily by engaging the eyes, and she who centers herself in its surface is unlikely to notice anyone in the background who lacks a certain status, distinction.
No, my girl, you know nothing of how we women are imprisoned in our lives, but there are ways to determine the sentence we must serve.
As Solomon said in the Old Book, if two women squabble over which of them is the mother of a certain infant, the way to solve the problem is to cut the baby in half and share the baby in parts.” “That’s revolting.” “Is it? I always wondered if that baby was a colicky brat and both women were really trying to pawn it off on the other one.
Death might be the only way forward for someone. Or it might seem so at the time.