For the man in the paddock, whose duty is is to sweep up manure, the supreme terror is the possibility of a world without horses. To tell him that it is disgusting to spend one’s life shoveling up hot turds is a piece of imbecility. A man can get t...
Death, with its ancestral weight of terrors, is merely the abandonment of an unserviceable shell at the time the spiritis reintegrated into the unified energy of the cosmos. The end of life, like birth, is a stagein a voyage, and deserves the compass...
Let me put it thus: that from the height of Weissenstein I saw, as it were, my religion. I mean, humility, the fear of death, the terror of height and of distance, the glory of God, the infinite potentiality of reception whence springs that divine th...
The real debate about both the horrific inequality in the world and about the terrorism and frightening instability in the world requires analysis of the differences in upset-adaption or alienation-from-soul between individuals, races, genders, gener...
Operating-room errors hold a special terror for patients, if only because they seem like the most avoidable kind of complications. The occasional horror stories of patients who have the wrong leg removed or the wrong knee replaced generate the most h...
[as Precrime cops barge through the different apartment rooms with their guns out, searching for John] Mother: [referring to her children] [furious] Mother: They're crying their eyes out! You terrified them! You... Knott: [growls] You don't want your...
Wally Weaver: You see, at the time I was misquoted. I never said 'The Super-man exists and he is American', what I said was '*God* exists and he is American'. Now if you begin to feel an intense and crushing feeling of religious terror at the concept...
It gives him spiritual freedom. To him life is a tragedy and by his gift of creation he enjoys the catharsis a purging of pity and terror, Which Aristotle tells is the object of art. Everything is transformed by his power into material and by writing...
The first time Akash took Supriya to view the pool, I rose up in strident protest, and he was astonished by the way she turned her face away, her eyes filled with terror. “I am petrified of water!” she whispered, as he tried to cajole her to at l...
I turned and beheld seven rows of plasma screens, each bearing seven vivid scenes, each flickering, each pulsing with a light revealing distant terrors, conflagrations, sufferings - and all thereby brought so close, and all thereby kept far away.
There are few genuine conservatives within the U.S. political system, and it is a sign of the intellectual corruption of the age that the honorable term 'conservatism' can be appropriated to disguise the advocacy of a powerful, lawless, aggressive an...
The quick, sudden terror of exploding bombs is not the same as the never-ending, bone-sapping fear of discovery and capture. It never goes away. There isn’t ever any relief, never the possibility of an ‘All Clear’ siren. You always feel a littl...
Imprisoning philosophy within the professionalizations and specializations of an institutionalized curriculum, after the manner of our contemporary European and North American culture, is arguably a good deal more effective in neutralizing its effect...
I used to go to church. I even went through a rather intense religious period when I was sixteen. But the idea of an everlasting life -- a never-ending banquet, as a stupid visiting minister to our church once appallingly described it -- filled me wi...
Even putting aside the culturally indoctrinated terror that someone in America will assume that two men engage in sodomy behind barely closed doors, there simply isn't an elegant way of asking someone of your gender to hang out for the first time.
At least not until the Terror took hold of him. Not until he saw, night after night, a little boat being rowed across the river. Not until he saw it return at dawn. Not until he saw what his Untouchable son had touched. More than touched. Enter. Love...
I once heard someone on the radio saying that a bee is never more than forty minutes away from starving to death, and this fact has stayed with me because it seems to have a certain personal resonance. My children are in a perpetual proximity to cata...
We are living in an era in which billions of people are grappling to promote communication, tolerance, and understanding over the more destructive forces of war, terrorism, and political chaos that have characterized the beginning of the 21st Century...
The man who finds that in the course of his life he has done a lot of wrong often wakes up at night in terror, like a child with a nightmare, and his life is full of foreboding: but the man who is conscious of no wrongdoing is filled with cheerfulnes...
Art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudointellectual masturbation . . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in...
For the first time his mind grasped the fact that when life has sentenced you to suffer, the sentence is neither a fancy nor a threat, but you are dragged to the rack, and you are tortured, and there is no marvelous rescue at the last moment, no awak...