Owning Quotes (page 271)
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I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals,...
Alain de Botton
You’re like a lighthouse shining beside the sea of humanity, motionless: all you can see is your own reflection in the water. You’re alone, so you think it’s a vast, magnificent panorama. You haven’t sounded the depths. You simply believe in the beauty of God’s creation. But I have spent all this time in the water, diving deep into the howling ocean of life, deeper than anyone. While you were admiring the surface, I saw the shipwrecks, the drowned bodies, the monsters of the deep
Alfred de Musset
After the first glass of vodkayou can accept just about anythingof life even your own mysteriousnessyou think it is nice that a boxof matches is purple and brown and is called La Petite and comes from Swedenfor they are words that you know and that is all you know words not their feelings or what they mean and you write because you know them not because you understand them because you don't you are stupid and lazy and will never be great but you do what you know because what else is there?
Frank O'Hara
The Prince found Buttercup waiting unhappily outside his chamber doors. It's my letter,' she began. 'I cannot make it right.'Come in, come in,' the Prince said gently. 'Maybe we can help you.' She sat down in the same chair as before. 'All right, I'll close my eyes and listen; read to me.'Westley, my passion, my sweet, my only my own. Come back, come back. I shall kill myself otherwise. Yours in torment, Buttercup.' She looked at Humperdinck. 'Well? Do you think I'm throwing myself at him?
William Goldman
Wholly absorbed into my own conduits to
an inner nature or subterranean lake
the depths or bounds of which I more and more
explore and know more
of, in that sense that other than that all else
closes out and I tend further to fall into
the Beloved Lake and I am blinder from
spending time as insistently in and on
this personal preserve from which
what I do do emerges more well-known than
other ways and other outside places which
don’t give as much and distract me from
keeping my attentions...
Charles Olson
Yes, I’ll be glad.” And she said suddenly, “There are some times, Joseph, when the love for people is strong and warm like a sorrow.”
He looked quickly at her in astonishment at her statement of his own thought. “How did you think that, dear?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“Because I was thinking it at that moment — and there are times when the people and the hills and the earth, all, everything except the stars, are one, and the love of them all is strong like a sadness.”
“Not the stars, then?”
“No,...
John Steinbeck