When you’re alone you can long so hard for something like an embrace that you mine it from the air. You find it in meanings that you might not otherwise grasp, for which it is helpful to arise early in the morning, when the mind is clear and the heart is gentle.
The abandoned stars were hers for the many rich hours of sparkling winter nights, and, unattended, she took them in like lovers.
That’s writing, huh. What does it do?” “It’s like talking, but it makes no sound.
The mind, you see, is like a muscle. For it to remain agile and strong, it must work.
Potatoes have much more staying power than caviar.
They move, don’t they? Who do you think sets things to moving? Nothing that moves lacks a soul.
You don’t want to be content with yourself. People who are, are insufferable, the walking dead. But you don’t want to be entirely driven, either, because then you just skate over the world and never touch it.
No matter what it is, if you don’t move your eyes and set the pace yourself, your intellect is sentenced to death. The mind, you see, is like a muscle. For it to remain agile and strong, it must work. Television rules that out.
Nobody steals books except kleptomaniacs and university students. In most places you can leave a book on the street and come back for in the next day.
I read. The more you read, the more the world opens up to you... and the happier you are and more comforted you feel. It’s up to you. No you is educated who cannot educate himself.
He wanted actually to live inside the dream that captured his eye, to spend his days and nights in a fume of burnished gold.
And then he was suddenly overwhelmed. It was as if a thousand bolts of lightning had converged to lift him. All he could see was blue, electric blue, wet shining warm blue, blue to no end, everywhere, blue that glowed and made him cry out, blue, blue, her eyes were blue.
Then occurred a rare thing about which men and women sometimes dream. They carried on a full conversation in complete silence, discerning feelings, plans, exclamations, jokes, opinions, laughter, and dreams- rapidly, silently, inexplicably.
Mortality is like the cold. It cannot be altered by human conceit or solidarity, and at the end you will be on your knees, in shock and amazement, and then you’ll have only one sword, one shield, one great thing to carry you through.” Alessandro waited to hear what that was, but his father would not say. “If you don’t discover it yourself, it will be nothing more than an exhortation from me.
But the long tunnels of art through which I walked in Rome that day had no ragged edges, cowardly colors, or shades of pastel that didn’t know what to do with themselves. The wisdom, perfection, and beauty of the colors and forms I passed were more than enough, in their collectivity, to hint at the principles which govern the hereafter, whatever that may be. Indeed, even a detail of one painting can offer solid direction in this regard if one knows how to look.
I wish that, like you, I could have spent my life transported aloft, as it were, every day, in music. Instead, I’ve lived like a caffeinated parrot.
The way she looked at him, and he knew it, it was clear that she was seeking someone she could love, someone who would love her as if she were once again a girl and the world was young. There was no question that he was capable of such a thing. She could see it in his face and read it in his every expression.
He thought only of one thing – the geometries before him. Here was God speaking in His simple absolute language, according to the same grammar that He had used to start the planets on their smooth and silken dance.
I don’t know for sure,” he said, “but I can’t imagine that God, who is so adept at linking parents with children, would so cruelly separate them. Perhaps it isn’t anywhere near the truth. Perhaps I’m merely self-serving. I don’t know, but I believe against all odds in exactly what you say.” “You don’t care what anyone else thinks, do you?” “No, Papa. I never did.” “That can only be because you believe.” “Yes.” “And how does God speak to you?” “In the language of everything that is beautiful.
No one ever said that you would live to see the repercussions of everything you do, or that you have guarantees, or that you are not obliged to wander in the dark, or that everything will be proved to you and neatly verified like something in science. Nothing is: at least nothing that is worthwhile. I didn’t bring you up only to move across sure ground. I didn’t teach you to think that everything must be within our control or understanding. Did I? For, if I did, I was wrong.