The occupants of memory have to be protected from strangers.
There are no beginnings, not even to stories. There are only places where you make an entrance into someone else’s life and either stay or turn and go away.
Everyone who’s born has come from the sea. Your mother’s womb is just a sea in small. And birds come of seas on eggs. Horses lie in the sea before they’re born. The placenta is the sea. Your blood is the sea continued in your veins. We are the ocean – walking on the land.
He said that in a way being loved is like being told you never have to die.
People can only be found in what they do.
Time is light, time is dark. You either dance, or you fall.
They waited. The door did not open. The rain did not stop. The darkness made a tent and covered them completely.
Nothing so completely verifies our perception of a thing as our killing of it.
Literature was intended to be dangerous. Art was meant to be dangerous. Ideas were nothing if they were not dangerous.
Complaints about reality are immature.
I doubt we will ever be forgiven. All I hope is – they’ll remember we were human beings.
All of this happened a long time ago. But not so long ago that everyone who played a part in it is dead. Some can still be met in dark old rooms with nurses in attendance.
Think of any great man or woman. How can you separate them from the years in which they lived? You can’t. Their greatness lies in their response to that moment.
I still maintain that an ordinary human being has the right to be horrified by a mangled body seen on an afternoon walk.
What you people who weren’t yet born can never know is what it meant to sleep in cities under silent falls of snow when all night long the only sounds you heard were dogs that parked at trains that passed so far away they took a short cut through your dreams and no one even woke. It was the war that changed that. It was. After the Great War for Civilization – sleep was different everywhere...
Your blood is the sea continued in your veins. We are the ocean – walking on the land.
Happiness is not our goal. The achievement of happiness deflects us from our true destiny which is the utter realization of self.
So far, you have read of the deaths of 557,017 people – one of whom was killed by a streetcar, one of whom died of bronchitis and one of whom died in a barn with her rabbits.
I knew that most of what is frightening and much of what is evil happens by the light of day. No need for darkness. Caesar, after all, had been murdered in the presence of a hundred people and more – some time between high noon and five o’clock. Right in these waters off the coast of Maine the most terrifying sharks are the ones we see in the radiance of fear. The real ones – darkened below us – do no harm until they rise towards the light. If only, I began to wish, it would get dark.
It was not the thought of seeing God that upset her. It was the thought of being seen.