Mediocrities flock to any movement which will indulge their self-pity and their self-righteousness, for without a Movement the mediocrity is on the slide into terminal melancholia.
Oh, kinda playing things by ear.
Where, in what cemetery of the heavens, did the tender words of lovers rest when they loved no longer?
Finally he said, “I like everything that wild Irish maniac, J. P. Donleavy, ever wrote.” It wasn’t so much a discussion as a sharing of taste. He also liked The Agony and the Ecstasy and Lust for Life by Irving Stone.
Brenda was six when she fell out of the apple tree.
Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History.
You, Lowell, beloved poet of many, what do you know of the dirt and the dark deliveries of the necessary? What do you know of dignity hard-achieved, and dignity lost through innocence, and dignity lost by sacrifice for a cause one cannot name. What do you know about getting fat against your will, and turning into a clown of an arriviste baron when you would rather be an eagle or a count, or rarest of all, some natural aristocrat from these damned democratic states.
It was getting to be the best conversation she ever had. She had always thought the only way to have conversations like that was in your head. Then.
Either the century was entrenching itself more deeply into the absurd, or the absurd was delivering evidence that it was possessed of some of the nutritive mysteries of a marrow which would yet feed the armies of the absurd.
Was it an hour, or a week before the light of the moon rose in the interior of my body? A bird with luminous wings flew in front of that full moon, and its head was as radiant as a point of light. That bird must be the Khu – this sweet bird of the night – a creature of divine intelligence loaned to us just so much as the Ren or the Sekhem. Yes, the Khu was a light in your mind while you lived, but in death, it must return to heaven. For the Khu was also eternal.
A criminal will never forgive you for preventing them from committing the crime that is really in their heart.
I must purchase this eunuch from You,” she said to Ptah-nem-hotep, Who smiled agreeably. “Are they not delightful?” He asked, and looked at the dark bodies of these five slaves with the same love I had seen my great-grandfather give to a team of matched horses or twin bulls, and indeed, since the slave wore nothing, one could see not only their plump and muscular haunches, but the shiny stump where their testicles had been and this gave them a nice resemblance to geldings.
When an officer of the law detects a vice in himself, he knows enough to start looking for its presence in others.
Angels often flee from people who scream too loudly – they know at such moments how close the man or woman is to us, and they feel outnumbered. For devils rush in to attend such outcries.
Since the sum of her experience had told her that the majority of one’s prayers to God were not answered, she prayed now directly to us, she called upon the Devil, she implored him.
There’s an old Talmudic belief that you build a fence around an impulse. If that’s not good enough, you build a fence around the fence.
I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected to Congress.
Freaks can be a fount of information.
Let the passions and cupidities and dreams and kinks and ideals and greed and hopes and foul corruptions of all men and women have their day and the world will still be better off, for there is more good than bad in the sum of us and our workings.
I know everything about love but Love itself.