The beauty of truth is that it need not be proclaimed or believed. It skips from soul to soul, changing form each time it touches, but it is what it is, I have seen it, and someday you will, too.
How just it would be if for our final reward we were to be made the masters of time, and if those we love could come alive again not just in memory, but in truth.
All these things were shaken about within Peter Lake like pots and pans banging against the side of a peddler’s swaybacked horse. It was hard to bear the weight of partial revelations which refused to venture past the tip of his tongue.
Only bad actors memorize lines. Good actors are perpetually writing them as they act.
And he was seldom out of sight of the new bridges, which had married beautiful womanly Brooklyn to her rich uncle, Manhattan; had put the city’s hand out to the country; and were the end of the past because they spanned not only distance and deep water but dreams and time.
Many people just like to show that they’re thinking the right thoughts. And as the ‘right’ thoughts change like the wind, so do they.
In the eyes of God, all things are interlinked; justice does indeed spring in great surprise from the acts and consequences of ages long forgotten; that love is not broken by time.
In living, one muddles through the years for the sake of those one or two moments which are indisputably great.
Your time is a good time, and though I have to leave, you can stay. How lucky you are to be in the city just before it opens its eyes upon a golden age.
For a gift that does not find balance and a service that is not returned are worth less than a curse.
Anticipation is the heart of wisdom. If you are going to cross a desert, you anticipate that you will be thirsty, and you take water.
He heard the Baymen tell of war, but they never said it could be harnessed, its head held down, and made to run in place.
Words were all he knew; they possessed and overwhelmed him, as if they were a thousand white cats with whom he shared a one-room apartment.
Well-timed silence is the most commanding expression.
And if you were a spirit, and time did not bind you, and patience and love were all you knew, then there you would wait for someone to return, and the story to unfold.
To see the beauty of the world is to put your hands on lines that run uninterrupted through life and through death. Touching them is an act of hope, for perhaps someone on the other side, if there is another side, is touching them, too.
There is justice in the world, Peter Lake, but it cannot be had without mystery.
I have been fighting over commas all my life.
Perhaps things are most beautiful when they are not quite real; when you look upon a scene as an outsider, and come to possess it in its entirety and forever; when you live in the present with the lucidity and feeling of memory; when, for want of connection, the world deepens and becomes art.
Mozart and Neil Diamond may have begun with the same idea, but that a work of art is more than an idea is confirmed by the difference between the ‘Soave sia il vento’ and ‘Kentucky Woman.’ We have different words for ‘art’ and ‘idea’ because they are two different things.