Opening Quotes (page 120)
In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere? "Bibles laid open, millions of surprises," as Herbert says, "fine nets and stratagems." God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.
C. S. Lewis
I looked. George Shearing. And as always he leaned his blind head on his pale hand, all ears opened like the ears of an elephant, listening to the American sounds and mastering them for his own English summer's-night use. Then they urged him to get up and play. He did. He played innumerable choruses with amazing chords that mounted higher and higher till the sweat splashed all over the piano and everybody listened in awe and fright. They led him off the stand after an hour. He went back to...
Jack Kerouac
[pitching the proposal for Mononoke-hime (1997)] There cannot be a happy ending to the fight between the raging gods and humans. However, even in the middle of hatred and killings, there are things worth living for. A wonderful meeting, or a beautiful thing can exist. We depict hatred, but it is to depict that there are more important things. We depict a curse, to depict the joy of liberation. What we should depict is, how the boy understands the girl, and the process in which the girl opens...
Hayao Miyazaki
SENSE OF SOMETHING COMING: I am like a flag in the center of open space. I sense ahead the wind which is coming, and must liveit through. while the things of the world still do not move: the doors still close softly, and the chimneys are fullof silence, the windows do not rattle yet, and the dust still lies down. I already know the storm, and I am troubled as the sea. I leap out, and fall back, and throw myself out, and am absolutely alonein the great storm.
Rainer Maria Rilke
What are you doing in there, waxing your mustache?” Iggy yelled, pounding on the bathroom door.
I yanked the door open and pushed him backward hard, making him stagger. “I don’t have a mustache, you idiot!” Iggy giggled and put his arms up to protect himself in case I punched him. “And you know what?” I added. “You don’t have one either. Well, maybe in a couple years. You can always hope.”
I left him in the hallway, anxiously fingering his upper lip.
James Patterson
To be shelterless and alone in the open country, hearing the wind moan and watching for day through the whole long weary night; to listen to the falling rain, and crouch fr warmth beneath the lee of some old barn or rick, or in the hollow of a tree; are dismal things - but not so dismal as the wandering up and down where shelter is, and beds and sleepers are by the thousands; a houseless rejected creature.
Charles Dickens
You wake up at SeaTac.
I study the people on the laminated airline seat card. A woman floats in the ocean, her brown hair spread out behind her, her seat cushion clutched to her chest. The eyes are wide open, but the woman doesn’t smile or frown. In another picture, people calm as Hindu cows reach up from their seats toward oxygen masks sprung out of the ceiling.
This must be an emergency.
Oh.
Chuck Palahniuk
Lies About Love. We are all liars, because. The truth of yesterdaybecomes a lie tomorrow, Whereas letters are fixed, and we live by the letter of truth. The love I feel for my friend, this year, is different from the love I felt last year. If it were not so, it would be a lie. Yet we reiterate love! love! love! as if it were a coin with fixed valueinstead of a flower that dies, and opens a different bud.
David Herbert Lawrence