Innately, the female knows how to cripple by sickening a man with guilt. It is a very special destruct, and she sends her curse to make a fellow impotent.
With his friends, an egotist. With love, lazy. With brightness, dull. With power, passive. With his own soul, evasive.
Those are the only two classes of people there are. Some want to live, but the great majority don’t.
In full tumult the great afternoon current raced for Columbus Circle, where the mouth of midtown stood open and the skyscrapers gave back the yellow fire of the sun.
History, memory – that is what makes us human, that, and our knowledge of death: ‘by man came death’. For knowledge of death makes us wish to extend our lives at the expense of others. And this is the root of the struggle for power.
The human being, more and more oppressed by the peculiar terms of his existence – one time around for each, no more than a single life per customer – has to think of the boredom of death. O those eternities of nonexistence! For people who crave continual interest and diversity, O! how boring death will be! To live in the grave, in one place, how frightful!
Who controls everything? Old men of this type. Without needs. They don’t need therefore they have. I need, therefore I don’t have.
For to be fully conscious of oneself as an individual is also to be separated from all else.
Never has any country given its people so many toys to play with or sent such highly gifted individuals to the remotest corners of idleness, as close as possible to the frontiers of pain.
He was looking for the Knight of Faith, the real prodigy. That real prodigy, having set its relations with the infinite, was entirely at home in the finite. Able to carry the jewel of faith, making the motions of the infinite, and as a result needing nothing but the finite and the usual. Whereas others sought the extraordinary in the world. Or wished to be what was gaped at.
Maybe the making of mistakes expressed the very purpose of his life and the essence of his being here.
He said, repeating the opinion of Socrates in the Phaedrus, that a tree, so beautiful to look at, never spoke a word and that conversation was possible only in the city, between men.
My very fingertips rehearsed how they would work the keys of the trumpet, imagination’s trumpet, when I got ready to blow it at last. The peals of that brass would be heard beyond the earth, out in space itself. When that Messiah, that savior faculty the imagination was roused, finally we could look again with open eyes upon the whole shining earth.
A wide wrinkle like a comprehensive bracket sign was written upon his forehead, the point between his brows, and there were patches of brown on his dark-blond skin.
Roumanian is an easy language. You just add a tl to everything.
And while the losses were small they weren’t gains, were they? They were losses. He was tired of losing, and tired also of the company, and so he had gone by himself to the movies.
It’s the hysterical individual who allows his life to be polarized by simple extreme antitheses like strength – weakness, potency – impotence, health – sickness.
Is it faith? Or is it simply childishness, expecting to be loved for doing your bidden task? It is, if you’re looking for the psychological explanation, childish and classically depressive.
Cynicism was bread and meat to everyone. And irony, too. Maybe it couldn’t be helped. It was probably even necessary.
In the language of evolutionary theory Bryan was a dead branch of the life-tree.