Repetition kills the soul.
I suspect Kierkegaard had just that in mind when he proposed that people had to be wary of feeling too saintly, since they could not be certain of the source of such feelings.
Retaining the phrases was a treacherous enterprise, however. His greatest problem these days had been boredom. Now he had discovered its loyal assistant – poor memory!
He does see Himself as the Divine Artist. Of course, He is also a blunderer – so many of His creations are botched. A good many are disasters which He then proceeds to plow back into the food chain. That is His only means of keeping His multitudinous, mediocre, and often meaningless spawnings from choking the existence of the rest. Yet, I will admit, He is dogged. He is still looking to improve His previous creations.
It is easy to comprehend people who are weaker than ourselves, but it is not as simple to be ready for the true feelings of those more powerful.
Certain kinds of honor could not be lost without demanding that one consecrate oneself thereafter – no matter how unsuited and unprepared – to a life of revenge. I.
If the world turned Fascist, if Cummings had his century, there was a little thing he could do. There was always terrorism. But a neat terrorism with nothing sloppy about it, no machine guns, no grenades, no bombs, nothing messy, no indiscriminate killing. Merely the knife and the garrote, a few trained men, and a list of fifty bastards to be knocked off, and then another fifty.
He was full of love – for himself, first, and his prowess – such a fine power at his age. Then, he felt a degree of love for her –.
The compulsive talker must go through the herculean transformation of learning to quit or must become a great monologuist.
By the time his political career began, he was in command of an artwork of lies elaborate enough to support his smallest need. He could shave the truth by a hair or subvert it altogether.
It was better than floods of misery that a son of her flesh had killed the sons of other mothers. That burned in her heart like the pain which flared in the arthritis of her knees. Pain was a boring conversationalist who never stopped, just found new topics. Bess.
There remained a hole drilled through his heart.
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.