“There's something about sports. You can be setting fire to cats and burying them in your backyard, but as long as you're playing team sports, people think you're okay.”
“I want someone who puts the whole ball of wax at risk. I want the kind of marriage where we would follow each other out into the stormy fatal sea or I'm not marrying at all.”
“All my life I had wanted to travel but what I discovered that year was that the things that you find out become the places that you go and sometimes you find them out by being jettisoned off alone and other times it is the people who choose to stand by your side who give you the clues. But the important things that happen to you will happen to you even in the smallest places...”
“The only really interesting thing about someone that makes you want to explore them further is their heart, and Miss Honeycut has a teeny tiny pea-sized one and it takes you nowhere you want to go.”
“I am not in the body of life. I hover on the extremities. I float.”
“At heart, we're all violent raging wolves, but in our actions we can be pacifists.”
“Sometimes you get tempted to make something wonderful even better but in doing so you lose what was so wonderful to begin with.”
“The only really interesting things about someone that makes you want to explore them further is their heart.”
“All kinds of ordinary people gave their whole hearts to things you wouldn't think you could give your heart to.”
“I left parts of myself some places and found others unexpectedly. New people appeared on the scene and others disappeared before I had a chance to say goodbye. All kinds of ordinary people gave their whole hearts to things you wouldn't think you could give your heart to.”
“My mother smoked too but I guessed by now she had quit the habit, which was, I supposed, one of the advantages of being shipwrecked.”
“(T)he only really interesting thing about someone that makes you want to explore them further is their heart”
“You can be sunk low or as a skunk and still have a joy in your heart. Joy lives like one of those spinning things---a gyroscope in your heart. It doesn't seem to have any connection to circumstance, good or bad.”
“Being together, like being able to see certain stars only with your peripheral vision, isn't something you can create. It's just something that happens to you.”
“But it didn't matter. Because all it proved was that my mother was sitting out there coatless somewhere, waiting to come home to me. Even as he stared at it, the remark "Your mother's dead" sitting unspoken, like something rotten in our path that neither one of us wanted to be the first to pick up. Even after the kind of day I had had, being taunted at school, and then threatened with incarceration. Even know that when I went home I would face a house full of ghosts, it didn't matter to me. Instead I felt a little stab of joy.”
“I would never go home again in quite the same way, but that was okay too.”
“For the weakest has but to try his strength to find it, and then he shall be strong.”
“I guess Smart Seth is glad, he said reluctantly. But be careful. Idiot Seth is the guy to watch out for.”
“Ester asked why people are sad.
"That’s simple," says the old man. "They are the prisoners of their personal history. Everyone believes that the main aim in life is to follow a plan. They never ask if that plan is theirs or if it was created by another person. They accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people's ideas, and it is more than they can possibly cope with. And that is why they forget their dreams.”
“Haven't you ever observed how we live in an age of self-persecution? What a lot of things there are one might do that one doesn't - and yet why, God only knows. Work has become so tremendously important to-day, because so many have none, I suppose, that it kills everything else... Work, work, work . . . an abominable obsession - and always under the illusion it will be different later. And it never is different. Queer, isn't it, that anyone should do that with his life?”
“[Aldous Huxley] compared the brain to a 'reducing valve'. In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world.”
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