I was a child who loved books, and I am an adult who is the product of books.
He was in his mid-thirties, tall and pale and thin, with long, sandy hair and rimless glasses, dressed in brown polyester pants, cheap brown shoes, and a light tan shirt. He looked like someone had put a wig on a giraffe and run it through the local Target.
We’re the world’s leading producer of serial killers. It’s a sign of sickness, is what it is. We’re sick and weak and these killers are like a cancer inside us: the faster we grow, the quicker they multiply.
No matter how hard Evil tries, it can never quite match up to the power of Good, because Evil is ultimately self-destructive. Evil may set out to corrupt others, but in the process corrupts itself. That’s just the way Evil is. All things considered, it’s better to be on the side of Good, even if Evil occasionally has nicer uniforms.
But I feared more the death of others. I did not want to lose them, I worried about them while they were alive. Sometimes I think I concerned myself so much with the possibility of their loss that I never truly took pleasure in the fact of their existence.
After all, what is hell but the eternal absence of God? To exist in a hellish state is to be denied forever the promise of hope, of redemption, of love. To those who have been forsaken, hell has no geography.
But there was a saying in Hebrew, “We survived Pharoah, we’ll survive this too.” In the words of the old joke, it was the theme of every Jewish holiday: they tried to kill us, they failed, so let’s eat!
There are some truths so terrible that they should not be spoken aloud, so appalling that even to acknowledge them is to risk sacrificing a crucial part of one’s humanity, to exist in a colder, crueler world than before.
He had found it hard to equate the priest’s God with the one who had left his mother to die slowly and painfully.
He had always worried about her when he was in school, because if he was away from her then he had no control over her existence.
Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling.
We face those that we have to face, and there will be times when we must make the choice to act for a greater good, even at risk to ourselves, but we do not lay down our lives needlessly. Each of us has only one life to live, and one life to give.
For a lifetime was but a moment in that place, and each man dreams his own heaven.
It has always seemed to me that there are two types of people in this world: those rendered impotent by the sheer weight of evil it contains, and who refuse to act because they see no point, and those who choose their battles and fight them to the end, as they understand that to do nothing is definitely worse than to do something and fail. – The Collector.
Real life was curious enough without the embellishments of fiction.
As for dying, he didn’t believe that he was frightened of it: the manner of it, perhaps, but not the fact of it. After all, he had reached an age where dying had started to become an objective reality instead of an abstract concept.
A mobster who knew Trump socially said of him once, “He’d lie to you about what time of day it is – just for the practice.
There’s a kind of evil that isn’t even in opposition to good, because good is an irrelevance to it. It’s a foulness that’s right at the heart of existence, born with the stuff of the universe. It’s in the decay to which all things tend. It is, and it always will be, but in dying we leave it behind.” “And while we’re alive?” “We set our souls against it, and our saints and angels, too.
Books are not fixed objects: they transmit words and ideas. Their effect on each reader is unique. They put pictures in our minds. They take root. You.
He has his father’s distinctive good looks, like a badly made crash test dummy. He also smells like a funeral parlor, but that may be incidental.