Humanity seems doomed to do more evil than good. The greatest ideal on earth is human love.
And suddenly solitude fell across his heart like a dusty reflection. He closed his eyes. The dark doors within him opened and he entered. The next performance in the theater of Grenouille's soul was beginning.
When they finally did dare it, at first with stolen glances and then candid ones, they had to smile. They were uncommonly proud. For the first time they had done something out of Love.
He lay in his stony crypt like his own corpse, hardly breathing, his heart hardly beating - and yet lived as intensively and dissolutely as ever a rake had lived in the wide world outside.
Like all stories of creators who bring life from the dead, his story began with a struggling butcher, who chased a gray cat, caught it, took off its studded collar, and slit its throat.
We can only feel sorry for ourselves when our misfortunes are still supportable. Once this limit is crossed, the only way to bear the unbearable is to laugh at it.
One of the first lessons that I hope you grasp is that woven into meaningful literature, so tightly that it can't be separated, is a telling lesson, even in stories as short as this one." "Always?" I ask. "Always!" she confirms. "Good stories teach!
I think that she is everything I have ever loved about our religion distilled down to fit into one person, everything about the faith that is both selfless and responsible.
Part of what I love about novels and dogs is that they are so beautifully oblivious to economic concerns. We serve them, and in return they thrive. It's not their responsibility to figure out where the rent is coming from.
Sin is a power; wherever it is given room, it will grow in strength, and it will take you where you do not want to go.
The key to successful change is sensitivity towards that which is indigenous and, in the long run, diversity will always be more resilient than monoculture despite the current unsustainable trends in the opposite direction.
This communal parenting brought me out of the privacy of our foreign enclave and into the public life of the community. Here, parenting was everyone’s responsibility; all adults were "aunties" and "uncles".
Thinking Reports enable the prisoners to wash their brains, and become new!" he announced cheerfully. "Washing the brain is very important to your reform, and improving your real situation.
A fantastically huge, roiling cloud, glowing bluish gray, swaggered over the city. It was more than three miles tall. Below it Hiroshima was boiling.
There really is power in numbers. In today’s society one has to understand the true power of word of mouth. It’s true that the new tastemakers are us.
While friends are there to motivate us and keep us pleased. Our enemies are there to annoy us, which makes us work harder to beat them.
As an observer of human nature, let's just face the facts: stupid stuff sells, and often the more stupid and silly it is, the better it sells.
It's ever so important to believe in what you do, trust your ability to create and show yourself worthy. Never sell yourself short.
All that pent up longing,” he says, “all that desire to flail and flap around. Them wings have needs.
...each part of a story, each word if possible, was to work frontally as well as laterally... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")
Through our reading we can travel to other times and other places, into other peoples minds and hearts and souls: it is a transcendent experience.
