“Like many young men in the South, he had trouble ruling out the possible. They are not like an immigrant's son in Passaic who desires to become a dentist and that is that. Southerners have trouble ruling out the possible. What happens to a... man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course.”
― Walker Percy, quote from The Last Gentleman
“Christ should leave us. He is too much with us and I don’t like his friends. We have no hope of recovering Christ until Christ leaves us. There is after all something worse than being God-forsaken. It is when God overstays his welcome and takes up with the wrong people.”
― Walker Percy, quote from The Last Gentleman
“But if there's nothing wrong with me, he thought, then there is something wrong with the world. And if there is nothing wrong with the world, then I have wasted my life and that is the worst mistake of all.”
― Walker Percy, quote from The Last Gentleman
“The happiness of the South was very formidable. It was an almost invincible happiness. It defied you to call it anything else. Everyone was in fact happy. The women were beautiful and charming. The men were healthy and successful and funny; they knew how to tell stories. They had everything the North had and more. They had a history, they had a place redolent with memories, they had good conversation, they believed in God and defended the Constitution, and they were getting rich in the bargain. They had the best of victory and defeat. Their happiness was aggressive and irresistible.”
― Walker Percy, quote from The Last Gentleman
“For example, she did not mind at all if Christendom should be done for, stove in, kaput, screwed up once and all. She did not mind that the Christers were like everybody else, if not worse.”
― Walker Percy, quote from The Last Gentleman
“Some little idiot is bound to press the ignite button just to see what happens.”
― Nick Bostrom, quote from Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
“There is music in your soul. A wild and untamed sort
of music that speaks to me. It defies all the rules and laws you humans set upon it. It grows from inside you, and I have a wish to set that music free.”
― S. Jae-Jones, quote from Wintersong
“Sophie smiled. “We all have our things.”
“Well, yours is weird,” Amy told her.”
― Shannon Messenger, quote from Nightfall
“I’ve got so much inside me I have no idea about. I’m like the mayor of a city I’ve never seen.”
He smiles at my phrasing. “If you knew the kind of little miracles happening every moment you breathe in, you wouldn’t be able to handle it. A valve could close and not open; an artery could split, you could die. At any moment. It’s nothing but miracles inside your tiny city.” He presses a kiss to my temple.
“Holy shit.” I clutch at him.
“You wouldn’t believe the stats on people who go to bed one night and never wake up. Normal, healthy people who aren’t even old.”
“Why would you tell me this? Is this what you think about?”
There’s the longest pause. “I used to. Not so much anymore.”
“I think I preferred it when I thought I was full of white bones and red goo. Why am I now thinking about dying tonight?”
“Now you see why I can’t do small talk. ”
― Sally Thorne, quote from The Hating Game
“Sometimes I forget for one second and it hurts.
It’s a different kind of pain than the constant, the weight that hangs from my heart. It swings from twine embedded so deeply that my aorta has grown around it. Blood pulses past rope in the chambers of my heart, dragging away tiny fibers until my whole body is suffused and pain is all I am and ever can be.”
― Mindy McGinnis, quote from The Female of the Species
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