“Possibility, infinity, beauty -- none of those words were right. [...] What he really wanted to say was: have you felt this? this phantom life streaking like a phosphorescent hound at the edges of your ruin? ”
“...he said almost nothing, and ground his teeth against his desire to tell them the truth: God is helpless. We are at the mercy of our own radical freedom, and all God can do is take into God's self the grief, the violence, the sublime acts of kindness, the good sex. God comes to us from the future, and has only one godlike gift: the lure. We are lured toward truth, beauty, and goodness...the lure is pulling at our hearts like some lucid joy inside every actual occasion and all we have to do is...Say yes.”
“But you can't ever live in the place you dream about, the town you long for. ...the moment you become conscious of your desire, and then fulfill it, it evaporates.”
“He did know: he knew her right away, and he felt known by her, and that was where the trouble really began...She could have been exotic or worldly or a Valkyrie and it would have meant nothing to him. But that Alice saw him―that was a feeling Amos had never experienced before, and it felt like a revelation and also like a virus.”
“The pigs were pushing their noses through the slats in the truck bed, which made Langston so unaccountably sad she thought she would have to sit down on the sidewalk. How is it possible, she thought, that a person can drive a thinking, feeling, animal to slaughter and not become less than an animal himself? And what were the pigs searching for, after all, but air and freedom?”
“Happy are those who know how to obtain pleasures without injury to anyone; insane are those who fancy that the Almighty can enjoy the sufferings, the pains, the fasts and abstinences which they offer to Him as a sacrifice,”
“It has been said that the Negroes do not connect morals with religion. The historian would like to know what race or nation does such a thing. Certainly the whites with whom the Negroes have come into contact have not done so.”
“You take what you can get and hold on tight to it- by any means necessary. After all you only live once.”
“ويكتب بورسواردن: "فى البداية نسعى كى نملأ بالحب فراغ ذواتنا ونستمتع لحظة قصيرة بوهم الكمال. لكن ذلك ليس إلا وهما. حيث إن هذا المخلوق الغريب الذى أعتقدنا أنه سيصلنا بجسد العالم، قد نجح فى النهاية، فى فصلناعنه فصلا تاما. الحب يصل ثم يفرق وإلا فكيف لنا أن ننمو؟”
“That’s why just about every top professional athlete has been laid low by injury, sometimes a career-ending injury. There was a moment in my career when I seriously wondered whether I’d be able to continue competing at the top level. I play through pain much of the time, but I think all elite sports people do. All except Federer, at any rate. I’ve had to push and mold my body to adapt it to cope with the repetitive muscular stress that tennis forces on you, but he just seems to have been born to play the game. His physique—his DNA—seems perfectly adapted to tennis, rendering him immune to the injuries the rest of us are doomed to put up with.”
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