Am reading the life of Mozart and cannot help thinking that one's capacity for suffering is in direct proportion to one's greatness.
The debris of her married life was enough to sever the tie between reality and dreams, the fine line between desire and temptation. Where did she draw the line? When did she admit defeat and surrender?
I remembered the pain as clearly as if I were shifting — the pain of loss. I felt the agony of the single moment that I lost myself. Lost what made me Sam. The part of me that could remember Grace's name.
RICH I’m lamenting. I’ve lost my innocence. CROMWELL You lost that some time ago. If you’ve only just noticed, it can’t have been very important to you.
She looked defeated, a castle stormed, torn down, with no one living inside. She looked like a hollowed-out creature, only shell and no soul.
Does God think that, because it is raining, I am not going to destroy the world? - Lope de Aguirre after going mad in the Amazon
Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.
Simon bristled. She wasn’t his Isabelle, not anymore. He wondered if she ever truly had been. Isabelle didn’t seem like the type of girl to belong to someone. It was one of the things he liked best about her.
Contemporary novels can have a fleeting existence within the current multiplication of medias and the technological rapidity with which art is delivered and consumed. A cultural lacuna has opened, one that needs arresting.
...Understanding as had the ancients that angels and demons were identical- interchangeable archetypes- all a matter of polarity: the guardian angel who conquered your enemy in battle was perceived by your enemy as a demon destroyer...
You know how, when you dream, sometimes you don't remember anything but what kind of dream it was? Frightening or hilarious or just strange? How there's only the feeling of it like a ghost in your mind?
Did you see the look on that guy's face when he hit the ground? He was all like "Come here, defenceless little girl,' and then you were like 'BAM! Take that, suck-face! I've got superpowers!
Paris shook his head."Do you think I would teach just anyone to fight me to the death? I want you to be my wife. My one and only wife.
Yes you may come." Paris held up a hand to delay Myrina's raptures. "But this time you will not be wearing my crown. You will be my slave, and believe me I shall enjoy ordering you around.
In my day the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting and learning. Learning was something you did only when the first three weren't available.
Raising children is, in a sense, the reason the society exists in the first place. It's the most important thing that happens, and it's the culmination of all the tools and language and social structure that has evolved.
And I came to understand, in a way I never had before, that books are truly the stuff of miracles. I even dared to dream that someday, somehow, I might surround myself with books from many times and many tongues...
It is possible to cause seemingly biochemical changes through human emotional involvement. You literally have changed his chemistry by being his friend.
.. a friend is someone who inspires, who challenges, who sends you in search of some truer sense of yourself..
More than half described Christians as literalistic, anti-intellectual, judgmental, self-righteous, and bigoted.
There's an intimacy in listening to somebody's lies, I've always thought--you learn more about someone from the things they wish were true than from the things that actually are.
