Through Quotes (page 171)
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God had poked His finger down into my nerves and gently, almost without thinking, brought a little confusion among those threads. And God had pulled His finger back, and behold--there were filaments and fine rootlike threads on His finger from the threads of my nerves. And thereremained an open hole behind His finger which was the finger of God, and a wound in my brain behind the path of His finger. But after God had touched me with the finger of His hand, He let me be and touched me no...
Knut Hamsun
THIS TORTURE
Why should we tell you our love stories
when you spill them together like blood in the dirt?
Love is a pearl lost on the ocean floor,
or a fire we can’t see,
but how does saying that
push us through the top of the head into
the light above the head?
Love is not
an iron pot, so this boiling energy
won’t help.
Soul, heart, self.
Beyond and within those
is one saying,
How long before I’m free of this torture!
Rumi
For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin-real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. - Sam's Letters for Jennifer
James Patterson
In the old Republican days the subject of slavery and of the saving of the Union made appeals to the consciences and liberty-loving instincts of the people. These later years have been full of talk about commerce and dinner pails, but I feel sure that the American conscience and the American love of liberty have not been smothered. They will break through this crust of sordidness and realize that those only keep their liberties who accord liberty to others.
Benjamin Harrison
Evidently, evildoing also has a threshold magnitude. Yes, a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life. He slips, falls back, clambers up, repents, things begin to darken again. But just so long as the threshold of evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains, and he himself is still within reach of our hope. But when, through the density of evil actions, the result either of their own extreme danger or of the absoluteness of his...
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
But what I remember is the countryside then, the brilliance of outdoors and outwindows, and the sunlight streaming through the lozenge shapes of the glass, and we were locked away from it, locked inside to worship. And there was the sun out there for everyone else to see. Good God, tell me Clovis wasn't lonely at dawn. Tell me he wasn't sick at the sunset.
William Gaddis
But on top of all that, the feelings about Princess, I'd also gone through an entire year of celibacy based on my feeling that lust was the direct cause of birth which was the direct cause of suffering and death and I had really no lie come to a point where I regarded lust as offensive and even cruel. "Pretty girls make graves," was my saying, whenever I'd had to turn my head around involuntarily to stare at the incomparable pretties of Indian Mexico.
Jack Kerouac
The world stands out on either side No wider than the heart is wide; Above the world is stretched the sky,---No higher than the soul is high. The heart can push the sea and land Farther away on either hand; The soul can split the sky in two, and let the face of God shine through...
Edna St. Vincent Millay
As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that...
James Joyce
That having sex with someone you do not care for feels lonelier than not having sex in the first place, afterward. That it is permissible to want. That everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn't necessarily perverse. That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels. That God? unless you're Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both? speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of...
David Foster Wallace
It was a shack, somewhere out on the outskirts of the Plains town of Scrote. Scrote had a lot of outskirts, spread so widely-a busted cart here, a dead dog there-that often people went through it without even knowing it was there, and really it only appeared on the maps because cartographers get embarrassed about big empty spaces.
Terry Prachett