Innocence

Each book is a mind alive, a life revealed, a world awaiting exploration, but living people are all those things, as well—and more, because their stories haven’t yet been completely told.

Love is absorbing, related to affection but stronger, full of appreciation for—and delight in—the other person, marked by a desire always to please and benefit her or him, always to smooth the loved one’s way through the roughness of the days and to do everything possible to make her or him feel profoundly valued.

Words are the wellspring of the world, and language is the most powerful weapon in the ancient and still unfolding war between truth and lies.

The only thing that survives is love, for it is an energy as enduring as light, which travels outward from its source toward the ever-expanding boundaries

Everyone talks about justice, but there can be no justice where there is no truth, and these are times when truth is seldom recognized and often despised.

Doubt is poison. It leads to a loss of faith in yourself, and in all that’s good and true.

There is no end of wonders and mysteries: fireflies and music boxes, the stars that outnumber all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world, pinhead eggs that become caterpillars that dissolve into genetic soup from which arise butterflies, that some hearts are dark and others full of light.

Perhaps you have always known everything important but will need a lifetime to discover what you know.

When we love someone, we’re held hostage by fate, because if we lose that person, then we, too, are lost.

We hold each other hostage to our eccentricities.” I smiled again, an unseen smile. “We’re made for each other.

When men in power decide that things need to be rebalanced at any cost, the violence is never brief and never really directed solely at the imbalance that supposedly inspired it. The rule of law becomes the rule of violence. Revenge becomes a synonym for justice. No city is safe from such horror, no nation, no time in all of history. Be ready to recognize the moment. Be always ready.

To live in the city of crowds and traffic and constant noise, to be always striving, to be in the ceaseless competition for money and status and power, perhaps distracted the mind until it could no longer see—and forgot—the all that is. Or maybe, because of the pace and pressure of that life, sanity depended on blinding oneself to the manifold miracles, astonishments, wonders, and enigmas that comprised the true world.

To believe in luck, you must believe that the universe is a roulette wheel and that instead of paying out to us what we have earned, it pays out only what it wishes. But it is not a spinning wheel of chance, it is a work of art, complete and framed by eternity.

I believe our recognition of reality’s complex dimensions is a consequence of our solitude.

Nothing is predetermined for us, and yet all our possible choices are threads in the vast weave of things, so that we have free will even though the consequences of our will are predictable.

Years later, after other experiences with dogs, I wondered if their species were shaped and charmed to serve as four-legged guides able to assist in leading humanity back to our first—and lost—home. By the example of their joy and humility, by wanting nothing more than food and play and love, by the deep satisfaction that they take from those humble things, they belie all creeds of power and fame. Although they have the teeth to tear, it is by swish of tail and yearning eyes that they most easily get what they want.

We have all been brought into the world for some reason, and we must wonder why and hope to learn.

But with one exception, all things pass from this world and time erases not just memories but entire civilizations, reducing everyone and every monument to dust. The only thing that survives is love, for it is an energy as enduring as light, which travels outward from its source toward the ever-expanding boundaries of the universe, the very energy of which all things were conceived and with which all things will be sustained in a world beyond this world of time and dust and forgetting.

Everything and everyone we treasured in this world comes to an end. I loved the world not for itself but for the marvelous gift that it was, and my only hope against eventual despair was to love something larger than the world, larger even than a near-infinite sparkling universe full of worlds.

To understand the universe, our world, and all life in the world, you have to step out of time, which for living humanity is not an option, because we are a part of this painting, characters within it, able to perceive it only as a continuing series of events, episodes. However, because we are conscious creatures with the gift of reason, we can seek and learn and extrapolate from what we learn, and conceive the truth.

To one degree or another, I have been happy most of my life, in part because the world has infinite charms if you wish to see them. - Addison Goodheart pg. 119

‘We hold each other hostage to our eccentricities.

The fallow soil of loneliness is fertile ground for self-deception.

It is music that speaks to the deepest reaches of your soul, and you are lifted higher, ever higher, by the adagio, in my opinion more so even than in any of the masses that Beethoven composed.

Sometimes I think there may be more truth in fiction than in real life. Or at least truth condensed so that it's more easily understood - Addison Goodheart pg. 84

If a man is a beast, he’s a beast in his heart, and that’s not the kind of heart that beats in you.

Maybe you think you don't need help. Sometimes, I think I don't need it, either. But we all do. We all need help.

I had remained hopeful that, among the millions on this Earth, there might be a few who could summon the courage to know me for what I am and have the self-confidence to still walk part of this life with me.

A city is half beast and half machine, with arteries of fresh water and veins of foul, nerves of telephone and electrical cables, sewer lines for bowels, pipes full of pressurized steam and others carrying gas, valves and fans and filters and meters and motors and transformers and tens of thousands of interlinked computers, and though its people sleep, the city never does.