Opener Quotes (page 20)
A burst of harmony so brilliant that it almost overwhelmed them surrounded Meg, the cherubim, Calvin, and Mr. Jenkins. But after a moment of breathlessness, Meg was able to open herself to the song of the farae, these strange creatures who were Deepened, rooted, yet never seperated from eachother, no matter how great the distance. We are the song of the universe. We sing with the angelic host. We are musicians. The farae and the stars are the singers. Our song orders the rhythm of creation.
Madeleine L'Engle
Jane remembers those years, though, as if they had been [a movie]--in part because her friends...always talked about everything as if it was over ("Remember last night?"), while holding out the possibility that whatever happened could be rerun. Neil didn't have that sense of things. He thought people shouldn't romanticize ordinary life. "Our struggles, our little struggles," he would whisper, in bed, at night. Sometimes he or she would click on some of the flashlights and consider the...
Ann Beattie
I will not pretend to justify this espionage I carried on, and I will say openly that all these signs of a life full of intellectual curiosity, but thoroughly slovenly and disorderly at the same time, inspired me at first with aversion and mistrust. I am not only a middle-class man, living a regular life, fond of work and punctuality; I am also an abstainer and a nonsmoker, and these bottles in Haller's room pleased me even less than the rest of his artistic disorder.
Herman Hesse
Never an illness, nor the absenceof grandeur, no, nothing is able to kill the best in us, that kindness, dear sir, we are afflicted with: beautiful is the flower of man, his conduct, and every door opens on the beautiful truthand never hides treacherous whispers. I always gained something from making myself better, better than I am, better than I was, that most subtle citation: to recover some lost petalof the sadness I inherited: to search once more for the light that singsinside of me, the...
Pablo Neruda
I’m always intrigued by my nonsensical concern with picking out a bunch of things that look exactly alike the ones that somehow I feel are the best and belong to me. It’s that same crazy urge or superstition, or whatever it is, that makes me open a Bible in a hotel room, hoping for some great happenstance spiritual word of advice. More often than not, I hit a long passage of begats and begots, which contain little inspiration other than the fact that procreation is the highest aim of life.
Vincent Price