But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart’s desire and must for ever after fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?
To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.
In spite of all evidence that life is discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random chance plays a great part in our fates, we go on believing in the continuity of things, in causation and meaning. But we live on a broken mirror, and fresh cracks appear in its surface every day.
Can one drown in one’s element... If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air?
Peace broke out.
Happy endings must come at the end of something,′ the Walrus pointed out. ‘If they happen in the middle of a story, or an adventure, or the like, all they do is cheer things up for awhile.
Without water we are nothing”, the traveler thought. “Even an emperor, denied water, would swiftly turn to dust. Water is the real monarch and we are all its slaves.
The process of revision should be constant and endless.
Once you have been in an earthquake you know, even if you survive without a scratch, that like a stroke in the heart, it remains in the earth’s breast, horribly potential, always promising to return, to hit you again, with an even more devastating force.
For an instant, silence, noisier than a waterfall.
Religion was the glue of Pakistan, holding the halves together; just as consciousness, the awareness of oneself as a homogenous entity in time, a blend of past and present, is the glue of personality, holding together our then and our now.
This unhoused, exiled Satan was perhaps the heavenly patron of all exiles, all unhoused people, all those who were torn from their place and left floating, half-this, half-that, denied the rooted person’s comforting, defining sense of having solid ground beneath their feet.
Then a strange moment came, a moment of the kind that determines the fate of nations, because when a crowd loses its fear of an army the world changes.
After a winter’s gestation in its eggshell of ice, the valley had beaked its way out into the open, moist and yellow.
Why, alone of all the more-than-five-hundred-million, should I have to bear the burden of history?
If you want pay, then just be gay.
Unhappy endings might seem more realistic than happy ones, but reality often contained a streak of fantasy that realism lacked.
He remembered the old Chinese proverb, sometimes ascribed to Confucius: If you sit by the river for long enough, the body of your enemy will float by.
Easily found, easily gathered, lives were the small change of this world, and if you lost a few, it didn’t matter; there were always more.
The black ice of that dark fortress received the sunlight like a mortal wound.