Peter Lake had no illusions about mortality. He knew that it made everyone perfectly equal, and that the treasures of the earth were movement, courage, laughter, and love. The wealthy could not buy these things. On the contrary, they were for the taking.
It was a good speech, but the reaction was due to the fact that politics are madness, and even if one does not know it, a country in electoral season experiences flares of lunacy like the great storms that sometimes march across the golden surface of the sun.
They were dancing around the fountain, arm in arm, in an old Dutch dance, their cheeks touching, their hands entwined. They had no music; they hummed. And there was no reason for them to be dancing that Peter Lake could see, except that it was an exceptionally beautiful night.
The horse could not do without Manhattan. It drew him like a magnet, like a vacuum, like oats, or a mare, or an open, never-ending, tree-lined road.
For what can be imagined more beautiful than the sight of a perfectly just city rejoicing in justice alone.
When faced with something I fear, I tend to eat spaghetti.
He could say nothing. He had no right to be there, he had already been profoundly changed, he was no good at small talk, she was half naked, it was dawn and he loved her.
Then the bow orchestra began to play an apocalyptically beautiful canon, one of those pieces in which, surely, the composer simply transcribed what was given, and trembled in awe of the hand that was guiding him.
Quite possibly there’s nothing as fine as a big freight train starting across country in early summer, Hardesty thought. That’s when you learn that the tragedy of plants is that they have roots.
The human race is intoxicated with narrow victories, for life is a string of them like pearls that hit the floor when the rope breaks, and roll away in perfection and anarchy.
A lot of people hate heroes. I was criticized for portraying people who are brave, honest, loving, intelligent. That was called weak and sentimental. People who dismiss all real emotion as sentimentality are cowards. They’re afraid to commit themselves, and so they remain ‘cool’ for the rest of their lives, until they’re dead – then they’re really cool.
He knew very well that love could be like the most beautiful singing, that it could make death inconsequential, that it existed in forms so pure and strong that it was capable of reordering the universe. He knew this, and that he lacked it, and yet as he stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Venezia, watching diplomats file quietly out the gate, he was content, for he suspected that to command the profoundest love might in the end be far less beautiful a thing than to suffer its absence.
As I understand it, miracles come to those who risk defeat in seeking them. They come to those who have exhausted themselves completely in a struggle to accomplish the impossible.
In the same way that certain sections of the city were mortal battlegrounds, some parts of the calendar were always more warlike than others, and during the days between Christmas and the new year all elements seemed to conspire to subdue the soul. Fire, rain, sickness, cold, and death were everywhere spread through the dark as in a painting of hell. People struggled until exhaustion, giving everything they had, and the days were packed with trials and mysteries.
Why do you think great leaders and great orations are coincident with wars, revolutions, and the founding or ending of governments and states? Common interests then are so clear that speeches are effortlessly drawn, but at present neither the facts nor the consequences are sufficiently clear to make oratory legitimate. This is the kind of war that will wind on and make fools of its partisans and opponents both.
The best thing in the world is the truth. You find it out anyway, in the end, or sooner.
I want nothing more than what I have, for what I have is enough. I’m grateful for it. I foresee no reward, no eternal life. I expect only to leave further pieces of my heart in one place or another, but I love God nonetheless, with every atom of my being, and will love Him until I fall into black oblivion.
Read what you find interesting, and then follow your interests. You’ll find that in doing so you always generate enough to illuminate the next step.
If when she is aged you cannot see in the eyes of a woman the youth she was at eighteen, then it is not she that is old but you that are blind.
When soldiers go home, their first desire, whether they know it or not, is to have children, children being the only antidote for war.