“To stop. To cease, just for a moment. To turn your back on the world, to close your eyes - to see the nothing that is not rather than the nothing that is everywhere around you. To just be quiet in your mind for a little minute.
There are paradises even yet on the abandoned plains of the earth -- and they are not filled with fecund flowering Edens but rather just with sweet unerring silences.”
“Your life ain't a target for the world to shoot at. The world is a target for your life to shoot at.”
“Stories that pander to your every readerly desire and whim are like overly loyal dogs that live for the simple glow of your approval. I'm a cat person. I like a little aloofness in my pets and my writing.”
“I think maybe I was just waitin on the apocalypse so I would have something to occupy me.”
“It's one of the happy things about a world gone so wrong: your personal freakishness don't stand out so much.”
“Everyone's always tryin to find an entrance to the kingdom of heaven, she says. Me, I ain't so interested in entrances. All I want's a kingdom of exits.”
“Honey, she says, honest ain’t the half of what I’m not.”
“It never meant anything, Moses says. Not to the god above it and not to the earth below it. It never did. Not even when they first did it. But it’s the doin it that counts. It’s something. You draw imaginary lines. That’s what you do.
The Vestal looks at him kindly, a smile on her lips that seems affectionate--even maybe admiring.
Then what do you do with the lines? she asks.
And Moses looks at her straight and true. He says:
Then you pick one side or the other and you stand there.”
“Hey, Murph! What gives, man?”
I jump and drop the letter. Melonhead, my “supervisor,” is standing at the crest of the hill, wiping a sweat-soaked handkerchief across his brow.
His last name isn’t really Melonhead, any more than mine is Murph. But if he’s going to take liberties with Murphy, I’m going to do the same with Melendez.
Only difference is that I don’t say it to his face.”
“When each day is the same as the next, it’s because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun rises.”
“Political stress is always apt to shrink the private arena and attach it on to the public”
“Boys normally attended the school for seven or eight years, beginning at the age of seven. The schoolday was long and characterized by an extreme devotion to tedium. Pupils sat on hard wooden benches from six in the morning to five or six in the evening, with only two short pauses for refreshment, six days a week.”
“Oh, you men,’ said Philippa. ‘You don’t understand anything. How can you show off your dress or your figure if you’re hiding behind a table in the gloom and smoke?”
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