Such kindness wasn't a gift but a goad, scraping against one's skin like a yoke of thorns. She would have preferred him stiff, defensive, even offensive.
There has been, down through the ages, a very real and "purposeful" conspiracy to thwart the plans of God.
The initial journey towards sobriety is a delicate balance between insight into one's desire for escape and abstinence from one's addiction.
India has always had a strange way with her conquerors. In defeat, she beckons them in, then slowly seduces, assimilates and transforms them.
There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lovers enter the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in a new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart...
Evil is a disease able to spread from one person to another, as each convinces the other that might makes right, moral short-cuts are good things, and your enemies are not human but other
It was the heart of any true moment of decadence: the knowledge that an epoque is already slipping from us, inexorably, even in the moment of its glory.
It is not the repeated mistakes, the long succession of petty betrayals--though, God knows, they would give cause enough for anxiety and self-contempt--but the huge elementary mistake, the betrayal of that within me which is greater than I--in compla...
I had hoped that the rest of the world would stand still while I got myself together again, but Chaos and Tragedy had marched into other lives close to mine as well.
Howard: Sometimes a betrayal can be so subtle that it clouds the whole thing. Nita: It would have to be a real betrayal. Not like canceling an appointment. It would be like you’d end the relationship in the middle. Howard: Why would I call it off? ...
She was my friend and I loved her and relied on her, even though there were days when her moodiness and fragility frightened me, because they reminded me of my own tenuous grasp on life.
They forget that we, too, have earned the right to live! So I say if we are going to die, my friend, let us die trying, not sitting.
Now, because we have spent so many years convincing the younger people that we are helpless, they believe that we are no longer of use to this world.
The Republic can count on me to battle its enemies... Offensive war suits the passionate character of the French, but it is the responsibility of the man in charge of leading them to prepare with caution and wisdom everything that leads to victory.
...we, as human beings, do not "enable" God to do anything. We are subject to His divine will---it is not the other way around. He is our Creator, and we are subject to Him.
All emotions, even those that are suppressed and unexpressed, have physical effects. Unexpressed emotions tend to stay in the body like small ticking time bombs—they are illnesses in incubation.
Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side. Betrayal is a friend I have known a long time, a two-faced goddess looking forward and back with a clear, earnest suspicion of good fortune.
Self-betrayal occurs when we do to another what we sense we should not do or don't do what we sense we should. Thus self-betrayal is a sort of moral self-compromise, a violation of our own personal sense of how we ought to be and what we ought to do.
Hana: [reads Almásy's note on the firecracker] "Betrayals in war are childlike compared with our betrayals during peace. New lovers are nervous and tender, but smash everything. For the heart is an organ of fire." For the heart is an organ of fire.I...
Betrayal... is my favorite subject.
-I'm going to heaven! I replied. -What do you mean, you're going to heaven? -Let me pass. -And what will you do in heaven, my poor child? -I'm going there to kill God, who killed Daddy.
