You’re growing up. Maybe that’s it,” he said softly. “Sometimes I think the world tests us most sharply then, and we turn inward and watch ourselves with horror. But that’s not the worst. We think everybody is seeing into us. Then dirt is very dirty and purity is shining white.
In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted shortcuts to love.
Curious how a place unvisited can take such hold on the mind so that the very name sets up a ringing.
There can’t be any world without Samuel. How could we think about anything without knowing what he thought about it? What would the spring be like, or Christmas, or rain? There couldn’t be a Christmas.
He climbed ecstatic mountains and floundered in the rocky darkness between the peaks.
It was a well-balanced family with its conservatives and its radicals, its dreamers and its realists.
It is possible that his virtue lived on a lack of energy.
Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands.
Was she very beautiful, Samuel?” “To you she was because you built her. I don’t think you ever saw her – only your own creation.
It was well known that Liza Hamilton and the Lord God held similar convictions on nearly every subject.
The ways of sin are curious,” Samuel observed. “I guess if a man had to shuck off everything he had, inside and out, he’d manage to hide a few little sins somewhere for his own discomfort. They’re the last things we’ll give up.
Will liked to live so that no one could find fault with him, and to do that he had to live as nearly like other people as possible.
She bought all new underwear. She had a horror of being found dead with mended or, worse, unmended underclothes.
Samuel smiled at him. “They say man lived in trees one time. Somebody had to get dissatisfied with a high limb or your feet would not be touching flat ground now.
Men and women wanted to inspect her, to be close to her, to try to find what caused the disturbance she distributed so subtly. And since this had always been so, Cathy did not find it strange.
And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?
When two events have something in common, in their natures or in time or place, we leap happily to the conclusion that they are similar and from this tendency we create magics and store them for retelling.
When he read his father’s books, he was the first. He lived in a world shining and fresh and as uninspected as Eden on the sixth day.
After a while,” said Cyrus, “you’ll think no thought the others do not think. You’ll know no word the others can’t say. And you’ll do things because the others do them. You’ll feel the danger in any difference whatever – a danger to the whole crowd.
He was forever inventing a new way of doing an old thing and doing it better and quicker, but he never in his whole life had any talent for making money.