They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself
A Christian should use these arts to the glory of God, not just as tracts, mind you, but as things of beauty to the praise of God. An art work can be a doxology in itself.
What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore it knows it's not fooling a soul.
Or is identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction?
The very nastiest and coarsest, I can't tell you. It is not grief, not dullness, but much worse. It is as if all that was good in me had hidden itself, and only what is horrid remains.
Everyone is a little bitter. We're born bitter. The personality itself is really just a very complex defense mechanism. A reaction to the first time someone said, "No you can't.
The fly lands on the swatter. The movie runs backwards and catches fire in the projector. This species apes us well by talking only about itself
Historical materialism has every reason to distinguish itself sharply from bourgeois habits of thought. Its founding concept is not progress but actualization.
What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
But virtue, as it never will be moved, Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven, So lust, though to a radiant angel linked, Will sate itself in a celestial bed And prey on garbage.
This love of theirs, with its reassuring domesticity and its easy silences, its permanence, has yoked Sally directly to the machinery of mortality itself. Now there is a loss beyond imagining.
C.H.R.I.S.T.I.A.N.I.T.Y.: it’s not so much the thing itself, but the side effects that kill you – the opportunistic infections of misinterpretation and politics – and the parasites that come with it.
Call him Voldemort, Harry. Always use the proper name for things. Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.
As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter...
No man will ever be whole and dignified and free except in the knowledge that the men around him are whole and dignified and free, and that the world itself is free of contempt and misuse.
The creative strength is good enough and deep enough to bring itself to flower and to grow in spite of this sickness.
How can anyone love someone who is less than a full person, unless love itself is domination per se?
She read and read and read, but she was stuffing herself with the letters on the page like an unhappy child stuffing itself with chocolate. They didn’t taste bad, but she was still unhappy.
She was reduced to the dependency of an infant, too terrified of life itself to find solace anywhere but in the familiar succoring breast and in the sound of that same heartbeat remembered from the womb.
The journey itself is going to change you, so you don’t have to worry about memorizing the route we took to accomplish that change.
[A]ny species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion.
