“young ones with respect for their digestions. “Well, you can’t feed it to them anymore. It’s gone way too high.” Her mouth became a straight line. “Not so high. It’s well-salted; we’ve eaten worse. If it’s that bad, the others would be sick and so would I.” He knew enough about homesteaders of whatever religious persuasion to hear what she was really saying: the sausage was all there was, they ate spoiled sausage or nothing. He nodded and walked back to his own seat. His food was in a cornucopia twisted from sheets of the Cincinnati Commercial, three thick sandwiches of lean beef on dark German bread, a strawberry-jam tart, and two apples that he juggled for a few moments to make the children laugh. When he gave the food to Mrs. Sperber, she opened her mouth as though to protest, but then she closed it. A homesteader’s wife needs a healthy dose of realism. “We are obliged to thee, friend,” she said. Across the aisle, the blond woman watched,”
― Noah Gordon, quote from Shaman
“No seu primeiro domingo em Galesburg, o diretor e a Sra. Hammond o levaram à igreja presbiteriana, mas depois disso Xamã disse a eles que era congregacionista e, aos estudantes de religião, dizia que era presbiteriano, assim, todas as manhãs de domingo, ele podia passear livremente pela cidade.”
― Noah Gordon, quote from Shaman
“All his life Rob J., struggling to salvage people from the afflictions that bring about physical and mental failures, was surprised at how much it hurt him when the patient was someone he loved.”
― Noah Gordon, quote from Shaman
“He cherished all those he treated, even the ones made mean by their sickness, even the ones he knew had been mean before they’d become sick, because by seeking his help, somehow they became his.”
― Noah Gordon, quote from Shaman
“Mississippi abajo en un barco de”
― Noah Gordon, quote from Shaman
“Yet slavery isn’t the real cause of the trouble between the regions. It is economics. The South sells its cotton and sugar to England and Europe, and buys manufactured goods from those places instead of from the industrial North. The South has decided it has no need for the rest of the United States of America. Despite Mr. Lincoln’s speeches against slavery, that is the sore that festers.”
― Noah Gordon, quote from Shaman
“Rob J.’ s revelation was science, a faith less comfortable and far less comforting. Truth was its deity, proof was its state of grace, doubt was its liturgy. It held as many mysteries as other religions and was beset with shadowy trails that led to profound dangers, terrifying cliffs, and the deepest pits. No higher power shed a light to illuminate the dark and murky way, and he had only his own frail judgment with which to choose the paths to safety.”
― Noah Gordon, quote from Shaman
“There was a good Constitution in America, and he had read it carefully. It gave liberty, but he recognized that it worked only for people in skins whose color ran from pink to tan. People with darker skins might as well have fur or feathers.”
― Noah Gordon, quote from Shaman
“They hired her for $ 17.50 a term, $ 1.50 less than Mr. Byers because she was a woman.”
― Noah Gordon, quote from Shaman
“It pays only three hundred dollars per annum, but Dr. Berwyn said it will lead to a good income as a surgeon. “Never downplay the importance of income,” he told me. “You must remember that the person who complains bitterly about a doctor’s earnings usually is not a doctor.”
― Noah Gordon, quote from Shaman
“They thirsted to fight because the war existed, and because it had been officially declared admirable and patriotic to kill. That was enough.”
― Noah Gordon, quote from Shaman
“Native-born Protestants loathed and oppressed Catholics and immigrants, and Catholics and immigrants scorned and murdered Negroes, as if each group fed off its hate, needing the nourishment provided by the bone marrow of someone weaker.”
― Noah Gordon, quote from Shaman
“When Rob J. had prepared for citizenship he’d studied the United States Constitution and marveled at its provisions. Now he saw that the genius of those who had written the Constitution was that it foresaw man’s weakness of character and the continuing presence of evil in the world, and sought to make individual freedom the legal reality to which the country had to return again and again.”
― Noah Gordon, quote from Shaman
“Do not be reluctant to value yourself highly, for others do so. Nor should you hesitate to aspire to any goal, because God has been lavish in his gifts to you.”
― Noah Gordon, quote from Shaman
“He realized the lesson was that science can take medicine only so far. Then it is helped tremendously if there is faith or belief in something else.”
― Noah Gordon, quote from Shaman
“He felt the same way about pulling teeth as he did about amputating limbs, hating to take away something he was never going to be able to put back.”
― Noah Gordon, quote from Shaman
“Death, be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so; For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.”
― Noah Gordon, quote from Shaman
“They don’t trust me. They hate the Irish and the Jews and the Chinese and the Italians, and God knows who all, for coming to America too late. They hate the French and the Mormons on general principles. And they hate the Indians for being in America too early. Who the hell do they like?”
― Noah Gordon, quote from Shaman
“Xamã uma vez ou outra ouvia os ecos amedrontadores da iminência da guerra nos Estados Unidos.”
― Noah Gordon, quote from Shaman
“It’s because the ignorant bastards consider me a foreigner, even though I was born in South Carolina and some of them were born in Europe,” he complained hotly to Rob J. “They don’t trust me. They hate the Irish and the Jews and the Chinese and the Italians, and God knows who all, for coming to America too late. They hate the French and the Mormons on general principles. And they hate the Indians for being in America too early. Who the hell do they like?” Rob grinned at him. “Why, Jay … they like themselves! They think they are just right, having had the sensibility to arrive at exactly the correct time,” he said.”
― Noah Gordon, quote from Shaman
“I walked among Shadows, and found a race of furry creatures, dark and clawed and fanged, reasonably manlike, and about as intelligent as a freshman in the high school of your choice-sorry, kids, but what I mean is they were loyal, devoted, honest, and too easily screwed by bastards like me and my brother. I felt like the dee-jay of your choice.”
― Roger Zelazny, quote from Nine Princes in Amber
“...making some noise in the woods is a thing that one can forget. The sound of a man’s voice on the other hand, is something else entirely.”
― Angelo Tsanatelis, quote from Origins
“Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if we will risk it on the precipice.
He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying.”
― G.K. Chesterton, quote from Orthodoxy
“Night, the astonishing, the stranger to all that is human, over the mountain-tops mournful and gleaming draws on. It was as though I stood at the topmost point of the earth, where the glittering winter sky is forever unchanging; as though the heath were rigid with frost, and adders, vipers and lizards of transparent ice lay slumbering in their hollows in the sand.”
― W.G. Sebald, quote from The Rings of Saturn
“Two things fill the mind with renewed and increasing awe and reverence the more often and the more steadily that they are meditated on: the starry skies above me and the moral law inside me. I have not to search for them and conjecture them as though they were veiled in darkness or were in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me and connect them directly with the consciousness of my existence”
― Immanuel Kant, quote from Critique of Pure Reason
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