Human existence being an hallucination containing in itself the secondary hallucinations of day and night (the latter an insanitary condition of the atmosphere due to accretions of black air) it ill becomes any man of sense to be concerned at the ill...
...and Jack, who felt like he was on the cusp of being able to read minds and thought it would be all right if Luce wrote him down for that. ("I sense that you're okay with that, am I right?" He made a gun out of his fingers and clicked his tongue.)
Katie shook her head in dismay. “I thought being poor was the worst thing that could happen to a girl.” “No, Katie,” the countess said in a clear voice. “The worst thing is to be in love with one man and have to marry another.” Katie O'Re...
There is a difference between WISHING for a thing and being READY to receive it. No one is ready for a thing, until he believes he can acquire it. The state of mind must be BELIEF, not mere hope or wish. Open-mindedness is essential for belief.
Love is a hooray in your heart. How can I describe how I feel about her except to say it’s almost like swimming in hot nacho cheese sauce, being chased down by a stoned Michael Phelps.
Working in a hotel is the anti-coffee shop, because instead of it being a place that’ll wake you up, it’s a place to sleep. And it’s a place to have sex, which is something Starbucks frowns upon (though I’ve never seen anyone frown during sex...
Maybe the most sacred function of memory is just that: to render the distinction between past, present, and future ultimately meaningless; to enable us at some level of our being to inhabit that same eternity which it is said that God himself inhabit...
Memories are strange things. Withough being something I can hold in my hand, they wield a beguiling power over me. Like a mirage in the noontime heat of summer, they dance before my inner eyes and beckon me to find water where there is not water.
I don't think Harry cares about being forgiven," Poppy said glumly. "Of course he does. Men love to be forgiven. It makes us feel better about our inability to learn from our mistakes.
God's being good does not somehow magically make all Christians good.
Why do we spend so much of our limited time on this earth focusing on all the things that our eulogies will never cover?
And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.
As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something e...
Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signi...
Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.
To be a child means to owe one's existence to another, and even in our adult life we never quite reach the point where we no longer have to give thanks for being the person we are.
Only the Christian religion, which in its essence is communicated by the eternal child of God, keeps alive in its believers the lifelong awareness of their being children, and therefore of having to ask and give thanks for things.
God defines himself as "I am who I am", which also means: My being is such that I shall always be present in every moment of becoming.
Being an unveiled wife is about confronting and crushing your fears; believing in truth more than in doubt, worry, or lies, and finding your security in God alone
It's hard to maintain a reputation for being grim and mysterious when you're accompanied by a brightly clad young thing, skipping merrily along at your side, holding your hand, and smiling sweetly on one and all.
