The Religion

Her eyes were of different colors, the left as brown as autumn, the right as gray as Atlantic wind. Both seemed alive with questions that would never be voiced, as if no words yet existed with which to frame them. She was nineteen years old, or thereabouts; her exact age was unknown. Her face was as fresh as an apple and as delicate as blossom, but a marked depression in the bones beneath her left eye gave her features a disturbing asymmetry. Her mouth never curved into a smile. God, it seemed, had withheld that possibility, as surely as from a blind man the power of sight. He had withheld much else. Amparo was touched—by genius, by madness, by the Devil, or by a conspiracy of all these and more. She took no sacraments and appeared incapable of prayer. She had a horror of clocks and mirrors. By her own account she spoke with Angels and could hear the thoughts of animals and trees. She was passionately kind to all living things. She was a beam of starlight trapped in flesh and awaiting only the moment when it would continue on its journey into forever.” (p.33)

Sadness is never bad," said Amparo. "Sadness is the mirror of being happy

Let the morrow bring on what it would, he thought, for it didn't exist. Only now could lay any claim to forever...

He who has not known war has not known God.

Men, and pigs, are hard on women who sacrifice their virtue, especially for love." Mattis Tannhouser

In the end, every man's life is but a tale told to him that's lived it, and to him alone.

And in that trance he wondered just how it might be that in a Universe as beautiful as this one some room had been put aside for the likes of him.

The old man's histrionics confirmed Tannhauser in his view that when misfortune befell the privileged they bore it with far less dignity, and a great deal more self pity, than did the rest of the human race.

Shoulder to shoulder they stood in a circle of woe, and woe was all their assailants found to greet them.