Passages

"Mingled with tiny shells I saw scattered petals Of bush-clovers Rolling with the waves."

"in the distance, an allusive expanse of expanded, indifferent purity. Because your eye clings to this margin, it appears to speed up."

"The Zen master Ikkyu was once asked to write a distillation of the highest wisdom. He wrote only one word: Attention."

"Somewhere Plato says that if you are going to shoot at a king you must be sure you kill him. The conservative bishops, in failing to destroy Tim, left him as a result even stronger than ever, which is the way with defeat; we say about such a turn of events that it has backfired."

"She was the golden thread running through everything, a lens that magnified beauty so that the whole world stood transfigured in relation to her, and her alone."

"It didn't occur to me then, though it certainly does now, that it was years since I'd roused myself from my stupor of misery and self-absorption; between anomie and trance, inertia and parenthesis and gnawing my own heart out, there were a lot of small, easy, everyday kindnesses I'd missed out on; and even the word kindness was like rising from unconsciousness into some hospital awareness of voices, and people, from a stream of digitized machines."

"It was in the summer of my twentieth year (1883) that I performed the ceremony of the elk. That fall, they say, the last of the bison herds was slaughtered by the Wasichus. I can remember when the bison were so many that they could not be counted, but more and more Wasichus came to kill them until there were only heaps of bones scattered where they used to be. The Wasichus did not kill them to eat; they killed them for the metal that makes them crazy, and they took only the hides to sell. Sometimes they did not even take the hides, only the tongues; and I have heard that fire-boats came down the Missouri River loaded with dried bison tongues. You can see that the men who did this were crazy. Sometimes they did not even take the tongues; they just killed and killed because they liked to do that. When we hunted bison, we killed only what we needed. And when there was nothing left but heaps of bones, the Wasichus came and gathered up even the bones and sold them."

"The dialogue between my Writing and my Life is always in danger of becoming a slithering shifting of responsibility, of evasive rationalizing; in other words: I justified the mess I made of life by saying I’d give it order, form, beauty, writing about it; I justified my writing by saying it would be published, give me life (and prestige to life). Now, you have to begin somewhere, and it might as well be with life; a belief in me, with my limitations, and a strong punchy determination to fight to overcome one by one: like languages, to learn French, ignore Italian (a sloppy knowledge of three languages is dilettantism) and revive German again, to build each solid. To build all solid."

"Peckinpah gives the final shoot-out in which they all die a kind of orgasmic rush that releases all of us from the cinematic or, more accurately, the American fantasy that we will survive no matter what."

"Certainly I would be less frightened of death (not just my own death but Welty's death, Andy's death, Death in general) if I thought a familiar person came to meet us at the door, because—writing this now, I'm close to tears—I think how poor Andy told me, with terror on his face, that my mother was the only person he'd known, and liked, who'd ever died. So—maybe when Andy washed up spitting and coughing into the country on the far side of the water, maybe my mother was the very one who knelt down by his side to greet him on the foreign shore. Maybe it's stupid to even articulate such hopes. But, then again, maybe it's more stupid not to."

"From my years at Cal in the English Department, I had learned to make up metaphors, play around with them, mix them, serve them up; I am a metaphor junkie, overeducated and smart. I think too much, read too much, worry about those I love too much. Those I loved had begun to die. Not many remained here; most had gone."

"One of the strangest and most perplexing accounts I ever read concerning my husband's suicide was that he, Jeff Archer, Bishop Timothy Archer's son, killed himself because he was afraid he was a homosexual. Some book written a number of years after his death-after all three of them had died-mangled the facts so thoroughly that, when you had finished reading it (I don't even remember the title or who wrote it) you knew less about Jeff and Bishop Archer and Kirsten Lundborg than before you started. It is like information theory; it is noise driving out signal. But it is noise posing as signal so you do not even recognize it as noise. The intelligence agencies call it disinformation, something the Soviet Bloc relies on heavily. If you can float enough disinformation into circulation you will totally abolish everyone's contact with reality, probably your own included."

"I watched him rather carefully but found him almost stubbornly honest, utterly devoid of worldly cleverness."

"If one is resting at A, he explains, and desires to rest in a distant place B, one can only do so by resting for infinitely brief intervals in innumerable intermediate places. Thus there is no difference essentially between what happens when one is resting at A before the start of the 'journey' and what happens when one is 'en route', i.e., resting in one or other of the intermediate places. He treats of these 'intermediate places' in a lengthy footnote. They are not, he warns us, to be taken as arbitrarily-determined points on the A-B axis so many inches or feet apart. They are rather to be regarded as points infinitely near each other yet sufficiently far apart to admit of the insertion between them of a series of other 'inter-intermediate' places, between each of which must be imagined a chain of other resting-places - not, of course, strictly adjacent but arranged so as to admit of the application of this principle indefinitely. The illusion of progression he attributes to the inability of the human brain - 'as at present developed' - to appreciate the reality of these separate 'rests', preferring to group many millions of them together and calling the result motion, an entirely indefensible and impossible procedure since even two separate positions cannot obtain simultaneously of the same body. Thus motion is also an illusion. He mentions that almost any photograph is conclusive proof of his teachings."

"Smilingly, blue lightning Assumes, like a meathook, the burden of his parts."

"In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. By then, gentlemen, I knew what I was doing. At some time everyone feels the need to make a great revolt, but one must choose the right hour. Had I left Arras during the madness, I would have saved only my reason, something I never lacked anyway. By leaving after everything was over, however,I saved a scrap of my faith. Not a lot, but enough to live a while longer in this best of worlds."

"She used to make fun of those people. With their happiness maps and their gratitude journals and their bags made out of recycled tire threads. But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be."

"By an extraordinary act of either ignorance or ill will, this rite for the "keeping of the soul" was prohibited by the government in 1890, and it was even required that on a certain day, established by law, all souls kept by the Sioux must be released."

"It was a rather cruel liberation. All people, no matter what their station, had always been part of an all-powerful hierarchy. It cannot be denied that hierarchy is a blessing, but it also cannot be denied that it is a leash and collar. Oh, I do not think that someone born a peasant suffers because of what he is or desires to be something else. Only a very narrow mind could conceive such an illusion. It seems obvious—a peasant is a peasant, and thus everything about him is peasantish, every particle of his body. He would have to stand outside himself and his way of life in order to perceive his own peasantness as I perceive it."

"Circe Berman had come down by then. We were both in our nightclothes. People do strange things when suddenly confronted by a person out of his or her mind. After taking one long, hard look at Slazinger, Circe turned her back on all of us and started straightening the pictures of the little girls on swings. So there was something this seemingly fearless woman was afraid of. She was petrified by insanity. "

"'Death is the mother of beauty,' said Henry. 'And what is beauty?' 'Terror,' 'Well said,' said Julian. 'Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.' I looked at Camilla, her face bright in the sun, and thought of that line from the Iliad I love so much, about Pallas Athene and the terrible eyes shining. 'And if beauty is terror,' said Julian, 'then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?' 'To live,' said Camilla. 'To live forever,' said Bunny, chin cupped in palm. The teakettle began to whistle."

"If the gravity of this moment outweighs your knowledge of where you are, that is pathetic. That is what makes the space above the ocean so attractive, but you still know enough to travel in a straight line through a patch of fog, and continue to walk when you emerge, with some fog clinging to you, up to your waist."

"To the extent that she can reconstruct a context or pornography in her body suitable for a hanged woman, a contingency is being beaten back, critically. In the sense that events happening at the same time are meaningful, though not connected, there are events which mean nothing, though there is something to mean. This is an easy way to expect with desire from moment to moment, while the woman was hanging herself, as if consistency and the quest for certainty were not emotional, as when a person begins telling a story, leaves move. He believed that when a life is valuable, there is further value when it is responded to as valuable, but this could occur through evaluative judgment, without his attendant emotion. The product is in one case consistent manners, in the other, beautiful manners."

"I got a job checking facts at a science magazine. Fun facts the called them. 'The connected fibers in a human brain, extended, would wrap around the Earth forty times.' Horrible, I wrote in the margin, but they put it through anyway."

"After the heyoka ceremony, I came to live here where I am now between Wounded Knee Creek and Grass Creek. Others came too, and we made these little gray houses of logs that you see, and they are square. It is a bad way to live, for there can be no power in a square."

"Though not nearly so spectacular, this manifestation of grief for Bunny was in many ways a similar phenomenon – an affirmation of community, a formulaic expression of homage and dread. Learn by Doing is the motto of Hampden. People experienced a sense of invulnerability and well-being by attending rap sessions, outdoor flute concerts; enjoyed having an official excuse to compare nightmares or break down in public. In a certain sense it was simply play-acting but at Hampden, where creative expression was valued above all else, play-acting was itself a kind of work, and people went about their grief as seriously as small children will sometimes play quite grimly and without pleasure in make-believe offices and stores."

"The sky was a light blue without distance, neither near nor far. I could gaze at it, through it and beyond it and see still illimitably clearer and nearer the delicate lie of its nothingness. A bird sang a solo from nearby, a cunning blackbird in a dark hedge giving thanks in his native language. I listened and agreed with him completely."

"Of all the many striking statements made by de Selby, I do not think that any of them can rival his assertion that 'a journey is an hallucination'. "

"'I discovered,' he said, 'that everything you do is in response to a request or a suggestion made to you by some other party either inside you or outside. Some of these suggestions are good and praiseworthy and some of them are undoubtedly delightful. But the majority of them are definitely bad and are pretty considerable sins as sins go. Do you understand me?'"

"He said, "And thus, the progress of your mind seems to result from a constant struggle—Heaven's grace grapples with the promptings of Hell. Where do you find confirmation that your halting mind, shackled by a thousand conditions, influences, tastes, lustful fantasies, fears, and caprices could be clearer and more able in its knowledge of God's intentions than the teachings of the Church? We live in cruel times, my dear Jan. People no longer desire to be honorable Christians. They follow the example of licentious princes and foolish bishops, and yield to bizarre heresies. They seek the presence of God in daily life and try to detect God's designs so as to meet them halfway, but God does not want people to strive so zealously for salvation. It is obvious that everyone desires eternal happiness, but they must surrender their fate into the hands of our Lord Jesus Christ and not try to take His place. . . . Jan, trust me! I have spent my life among books and the treatises of the wisest authors. It's laughable! I despise all those usurpers who would save the Holy Church with their belief in reason. The Church's greatest power lies in the sacraments, for they are the narrow footbridge thrown over life's abysses and along which God draws near to us. By remaining faithful to the sacraments, you remain faithful to God. He is with you then, and you with Him. If God gave you a mind, it was not to be used to strive for Heaven but to move about this earth."

"And he tells me all those strange things and always talks about his wife and what times we have nowadays. Everything is being torn up and destroyed and if you want to be honest, you have to admit that you can't figure things out anymore. And particularly an educated man can't build anything for himself anymore, and everything is uncertain. The whole world is uncertain and life and the future and what we used to believe in and what we believe now, and work isn't fun anymore, because you always have a bad conscience because there are so many people who don't have any. And so a man has nothing but his wife and he's very dependent on her because he wants to be able to believe in something, and that's the love for his wife-- and then she doesn't want all that love and that you're not worth anything at all anymore. And because you're nothing but a burden on humanity these days-- that's why you need that special someone so badly to whom you can be a joy. And then all of a sudden you're no joy anymore. And true elegance is disappearing in this day and age and in times like that, women are the first ones to slide, and men are held by the law and they hold women too-- and once all the laws of humanity have disappeared, man has nothing more to hold onto, but you can't tell, because he never did in a moral sense-- and what falls first in a way to be noticed by everyone, that's always the woman."

"And as far as Robert? Oh, God bless Robert! There was a man. He would have no problem whatsoever with this Family Mission. She loved the way he had of saying "Ho HO!" whenever she brought home something new and unexpected. "Ho HO!" Robert had said, coming home to find the iguana. "Ho HO!" he had said, coming home to find the ferret trying to get into the iguana cage. "We appear to be the happy operators of a menagerie!" "

"A poem for a pair of faithful osprey nesting on a rock: What divine instinct Has taught these birds No waves swell so high As to swamp their home?"

"To whom it may concern: Every now and then there comes a time when the neutral and impersonal forces of the world turn and come together in a thundercrack of judgment. "

""The people on the council made a grievous error, but I will not be their judge. I'm feeling too weary to prosecute others for their sins. They've made their beds; let them lie in them. And it wasn't I who led them astray. If I seek the freedom most appropriate for me, I will not deprive them of choice either. Let each man go his own way. The way of the foolish is not for me; but neither shall I attempt to correct them, for it will only come to naught. Let the sober stay with their sobriety, and the madmen with their madness.""

"Why science does not use a word like she or there, is why the hand cannot make a sharp edge in the sand."

"The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind. (Fun Fact.)"

"Move, if you can hear, Silent mound of my friend, My wails and the answering Roar of autumn wind."

"“I can’t help it,” I said. “My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things.” “Your what and your what?” he said. “My soul and my meat,” I said. “They’re separate?” he said. “I sure hope they are,” I said. I laughed. “I would hate to be responsible for what my meat does.” I told him, only half joking, about how I imagined the soul of each person, myself included, as being a sort of flexible neon tube inside. All the tube could do was receive news about what was happening with the meat, over which it had no control. “So when people I like do something terrible,” I said, “I just flense them and forgive them.” “Flense?” he said. “What’s flense?” “It’s what whalers used to do to whale carcasses when they got them on board,” I said. “They would strip off the skin and blubber and meat right down to the skeleton. I do that in my head to people—get rid of all the meat so I can see nothing but their souls. Then I forgive them.”"

"Hiring a boat at the port of Yoshizaki on the border of the province of Echizen, I went to see the famous pine of Shiogoshi. The entire beauty of this place, I thought, was best expressed in the following poem by Saigyo. Inviting the wind to carry Salt waves of the sea, The pine tree of Shiogoshi Trickles all night long Shiny drops of moonlight. Should anyone dare to write another poem on this pine tree, it would be like trying to add a sixth finger to his hand."

"I look at the blanked-out faces of the other passengers--hoisting their briefcases, their backpacks, shuffling to disembark--and I think of what Hobie said: beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful. Only what is that thing? Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet--for me, anyway--all that's worth living for lies in that charm? A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don't get to choose our own hearts. We can't make ourselves want what's good for us or what's good for other people. We don't get to choose the people we are. Because--isn't it drilled into us constantly, from childhood on, an unquestioned platitude in the culture--? From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it's a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what's right for us? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: "Be yourself." "Follow your heart." Only here's what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted--? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight toward a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?...If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Stop your ears with wax? Ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you? Set yourself on the course that will lead you dutifully towards the norm, reasonable hours and regular medical check-ups, stable relationships and steady career advancement the New York Times and brunch on Sunday, all with the promise of being somehow a better person? Or...is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name."

"I wish to mention here, that through these rites a three-fold peace was established. The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all of its Powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Tanka, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. This is the real Peace, and the others are but reflections of this. The second peace is that which is made between two individuals, and the third is that which is made between two nations. But above all you should understand that there can never be peace between nations until there is first known that true peace which, as I have often said, is within the souls of men."

"Of course there was very much in the vision that even I can not tell when I try hard, because very much of it was not for words. But I have told what can be told."

"This is the sea, then, this great abeyance."

"The paramedic riding in the back wasn't much older than I was; a kid, really, with bad skin and a downy little moustache. He had never seen a gunshot wound. He kept asking what it felt like? dull or sharp? an ache or burn? My head was spinning and naturally I could give him no kind of coherent answer but I remember thinking dimly that it was sort of like the first time I got drunk, or slept with a girl; not quite what one expected, really, but once it happened one realized it couldn't be any other way."

"What of it that they were guilty, if that guilt had cost them so much despair and isolation? They could undergo no punishment greater than having been deceived by the ostensible destiny to which they had yielded in good faith. They stood by the Trinity Gate so bereft and injured that they no longer had the will to humbly confess their guilt. I even think they did not feel guilty in the way an outsider might expect: they did not feel guilty about what they had done but rather about the good faith in which they had acted. In honest dialogue with themselves, they would not have asked, "Why did you kill innocent people?" but, "Why did you believe that you should kill people in Arras?""

"Resolutely I stared at the television. I hadn't been at school since the day before my mother died and as long as I stayed away her death seemed unofficial somehow. But once I went back it would be a public fact. Worse: the thought of returning to any kind of normal routine seemed disloyal, wrong. It kept being a shock every time I remembered it, a fresh slap: she was gone. Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away."

"Twice on Sundays, morning and evening, the town bell-ringers sent their carillons pounding out over the surrounding countryside. There was no escape from the probing notes. They bit into the air and shook it with a doggy zeal. The bells made Esther feel left out, as if from some fine local feast."

"I loved him the most of all of them. I knew it when I heard the news, knew it in a different way than I had known it before; before it had been a feeling, an emotion. But when I realized he was dead, that knowledge made me into a sick person that limped and cringed, but drove to work and filled the register and answered the phone and asked customers if I could help them; I wasn't sick as a human is sick or an animal is sick; I became ill like a machine. I still moved but my soul died, my soul that, Tim had said, had never been fully born; that soul, not yet born, but born a little and wishing to be born more, born fully, that soul died and my body mechanically continued on. The soul I lost during that week did not ever return; I am a machine now, years later; a machine heard the news of John Lennon's death and a machine grieved and pondered and drove to Sausalito to sit in on Edgar Barefoot's seminar, because that is what a machine does: that is a machine's way of greeting the horrible. A machine doesn't know any better; it simply grinds along, and maybe whirrs. That is all it can do. You cannot expect more than that from a machine. That is all it has to offer. That is why we speak of it as a machine; it understands, intellectually, but there is no understanding in its heart because its heart is a mechanical one, designed to act as a pump. And so it pumps, and so the machine limps and coasts on, and knows but does not know. And keeps up its routine. It lives out what it supposes to be life: it maintains its schedule and obeys the laws. It does not drive its car over the speed limit on the Richardson Bridge and it says to itself: I never liked the Beatles: I found them insipid. Jeff brought home Rubber Soul and if I hear ... it repeats to itself what it has thought and heard, the simulation of life. Life it once possessed and now has lost; a life now gone. It knows it knows not what, as the philosophy books say about a confused philosopher; I forget which one. Locke, maybe. “And Locke believes he knows not what.” That impressed me, that turn of phrase. I look for that; I am attracted to clever phrases, which are to be regarded as good English prose style. I am a professional student and will remain one; I will not change. My opportunity to change was offered to me and I turned it down; I am stuck, now, and, as I say, know but know not what.”"

"The map said that if you drove X miles you would arrive at place Y, whereupon he would start up the car and drive X miles knowing that Y would be there; it said so on the map. The man who doubted every article of Christian doctrine believed everything he saw written down. "

"Father thou art in heaven, please make my inside so good and so fine that he can love me. I'm going to buy him a tie, because that's something I can do. Someone once told me that I have an almost masculine understanding of it. i guess there are situations where having a past is to your advantage. Heavenly Father, perform a miracle and give me an education--I can do the rest myself with make-up."

"The diaphanous satins of a January window White as babies’ bedding and glittering with dead breath. O ivory!"

"What God demands of man is a thousand times greater than what He asks of a rat, but that does not mean in the least that the rat is damned for all time."

"Only those who have had visions of the thunder beings of the west can act as heyokas. They have sacred power and they share some of this with all the people, but they do it through funny actions. When a vision comes from the thunder beings of the west, it comes with terror like a thunder storm; but when the storm of vision has passed, the world is greener and happier; for wherever the truth of vision comes upon the world, it is like a rain. The world, you see, is happier after the terror of the storm. But in the heyoka ceremony, everything is backwards, and it is planned that the people shall be made to feel jolly and happy first, so that it may be easier for the power to come to them. You have noticed that the truth comes into this world with two faces. One is sad with suffering, and the other laughs; but it is the same face, laughing or weeping. When people are already in despair, maybe the laughing face is better for them; and when they feel too good and are too sure of being safe, maybe the weeping face is better for them to see. And so I think that is what the heyoka ceremony is for."

""'No' is, generally speaking, a better answer than 'Yes,'" he said at last. He seemed to speak eagerly, his words coming out as if they had been imprisoned in his mouth for a thousand years. He seemed relieved that I had found a way to make him speak. I thought he even smiled slightly at me but this was doubtless the trickery of the bad morning light or a mischief worked by the shadows of the lamp. He swallowed a long draught of tea and sat waiting, looking at me with his queer eyes. They were now bright and active and moved about restlessly in their yellow wrinkled sockets. "Do you refuse to tell me why you say that?" I asked. "No," he said. "When I was a young man I led an unsatisfactory life and devoted most of my time to excesses of one kind or another, my principal weakness being Number One.""

"My childhood landscape was not land but the end of the land—the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic. I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own. I pick it up, exile that I am, like the purple “lucky stones” I used to collect with a white ring all the way round, or the shell of a blue mussel with its rainbowy angel’s fingernail interior; and in one wash of memory the colors deepen and gleam, the early world draws breath."

"She was sorry, and—maybe she was speaking out of turn, and if so she hoped I forgave her, but I shouldn't think she didn't love me back, because she did, she did. (You do? I thought, bewildered.) Only it was complicated, she wasn't thinking only of herself but me too, since we'd both been through so many of the same things, she and I, and we were an awful lot alike—too much. And because we'd both been hurt so badly, so early on, in violent and irremediable ways that most people didn't, and couldn't, understand, wasn't it a bit… precarious? A matter of self-preservation? Two rickety and death-driven persons who would need to lean on each other quite so much? not to say she wasn't doing well at the moment, because she was, but all that could change in a flash with either of us, couldn't it? the reversal, the sharp downward slide, and wasn't that the danger? since our flaws and weaknesses were so much the same, and one of us could bring the other down way too quick? and though this was left to float in the air a bit, I realized instantly, and with some considerable astonishment, what she was getting at. (Dumb of me not to have seen it earlier, after all the injuries, the crushed leg, the multiple surgeries; adorable drag in the voice, adorable drag in the step, the arm-hugging and the pallor, the scarves and sweaters and multiple layers of clothes, slow drowsy smile: she herself, the dreamy childhood her, was sublimity and disaster, the morphine lollipop I'd chased for all those years.) But, as the reader of this will have ascertained (if there ever is a reader) the idea of being Dragged Down holds no terror for me. Not that I care to drag anyone else down with me, but—can't I change? Can't I be the strong one? Why not?"

"And John says: “I could love you violently, if I let myself.” But he has not let himself. Why? Because I haven’t touched him, I haven’t looked into his eyes with the image he wants to see there. And I could. But I am too tired, too noble, in a perverse way. It sickens me. I wouldn’t want him, even as he became a victim. So I tell him casually that I won’t let it happen, playfully, because it is a stillborn child. I have given birth to so many of these."

""How can you tell a good painting from a bad one?" he said. This is the son of a Hungarian horse trainer. He has a magnificent handlebar mustache. "All you have to do, my dear," he said, "is look at a million paintings, and then you can never be mistaken.""

""It has been said here that reason is the devil's tool. That's not true! But it is true that the devil can dwell only in the mind and never in the heart of man. I would not be able to answer the question of whether or not Jan is guilty! His heresy lies mostly in his lack of trust, for all his fine efforts. He constantly yields to strange promptings. They might come from the devil, or his submission may just be out of weakness. We should be concerned with the salvation of this soul, not its damnation. I think Jan should be removed from the council so as to have time for meditation and prayer. Then we shall see. . .""

"The men also put rabbit skins on their arms and legs, for the rabbit represents humility, because he is quiet and soft and not self-asserting-- a quality which we must all possess when we go to the center of the world."

"In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. The world is hopelessly constructed. Imagine the existence of an ox. "

"Humanity is an ever-widening spiral and life is the beam that plays briefly on each succeeding ring."

"The Six Grandfathers have placed in this world many things, all of which should be happy. Every little thing is sent for something, and in that thing there should be happiness and the power to make happy. Like the grasses showing tender faces to each other, thus we should do, for this was the wish of the Grandfathers of the World."

"The fixed idea kind of madness is fascinating, if you are inclined toward viewing with interest something that is palpably impossible and yet nonetheless exists. Over-valence is a notion about possibilities in the human mind, possibilities of something going wrong, that did it not exist it could not be supposed. I mean by this simply that you have to see an over-valent idea at work fully to appreciate it. The older term is idee fire. Over-valent idea expresses it better, because this is a term derived from mechanics and chemistry and biology; it is a graphic term and it involves the notion of power. The essence of valence is power and that is what I am talking about; I speak of an idea that once it comes into the human mind, the mind, I mean, of a given human being, it not only never goes away, it also consumes everything else in the mind so that, finally, the person is gone, the mind as such is gone, and only the over-valent idea remains."

"I felt as if all my weariness and perplexities of the day had descended on me pleasurably like a great heavy quilt which would keep me warm and sleepy. My knees opened up like rosebuds in rich sunlight, pushing my shins two inches further to the bottom of the bed. Every joint became loose and foolish and devoid of true utility. Every inch of my person gained weight with every second until the total burden on the bed was approximately five hundred thousand tons. This was evenly distributed on the four wooden legs of the bed, which had by now become an integral part of the universe. My eyelids, each weighing no less than four tons, slewed ponderously across my eyeballs. My narrow shins, itchier and more remote in their agony of relaxation, moved further away from me till my happy toes pressed closely on the bars. My position was completely horizontal, ponderous, absolute and incontrovertible. United with the bed I became momentous and planetary."

"The "lamenter" should also notice if one of the little birds should come, or even perhaps a squirrel. At first the animals or winged peoples may be wild, but soon they become tame, and the birds will sit on poles, or even little ants or worms may crawl on the pipe. All these people are important, for in their own way they are wise and they can teach us two-leggeds much if we make ourselves humble before them. The most important of all the creatures are the wingeds, for they are nearest to the heavens, and are not bound to the earth as are the four-leggeds, or the little crawling people."

"I would not want to make you unhappy by detailing pain, but there is a crucial sort of difference between pain and the narration of pain. I am telling you what happened. If there is vicarious pain in knowing, there is actual peril in not knowing. In aversion lies a colossal risk."

"“Yes, there are stars," I lie and I give them to him--there are no stars--but there must be some behind the clouds and they must be shining inside-out tonight. I love stars, but I hardly ever notice them. I guess when you're blind, you realize how much you forget to see."

"They did nothing— other than subjecting us to complete nothingness. For, as is well known, nothing on earth puts more pressure on the human mind than nothing."

"How could she do it to him? I asked myself. What malice. What abysmal cruelty, toward us all. She really hated us. This is our punishment. I'll always think I'm responsible; Tim will always think he's responsible; Bill likewise. And of course none of us is, and yet in a sense all of us are, but anyhow it is beside the point, after the fact, null and moot and void, totally void, as in “the infinite void,” the sublime non-Being of God."

"Matsushima is a cheerful laughing beauty, while the charm of Kisagata is in the beauty of its weeping countenance. It is not only lonely but also penitent, as it were, for some unknown evil. Indeed it has a striking resemblance to the expression of a troubled mind."

"“You get to tell the truth,” I said, “when you're schizophrenic.” “Then more people should be schizophrenic.”"

"Her death the dividing mark: Before and After. And though it's a bleak thing to admit all these years later, still I've never met anyone who made me feel loved the way she did. Everything came alive in her company; she cast a charmed theatrical light about her so that to see anything through her eyes was to see it in brighter colours than ordinary"

"The wind from the east is a deep purple, from the south a fine shining silver. The north wind is a hard black and the west is amber. People in the old days had the power of perceiving these colours and could spend a day sitting quietly on a hillside watching the beauty of the winds, their fall and rise and changing hues, the magic of neighbouring winds when they are interweaved like ribbons at a wedding. It was a better occupation than gazing at newspapers."

"I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell."

"Even my grandfather, on the glassed-in verandah, couldn’t woo me from my huge gloom. I refused to hide his pipe in the rubber plant and make it a pipe tree. He stalked off in his sneakers, wounded too, but whistling. I waited till his shape rounded Water Tower Hill and dwindled in the direction of the sea promenade; its ice-cream and hotdog stalls were boarded up still, in spite of the mild pre-season weather. His lyrical whistle beckoned me to adventure and forgetting. But I didn’t want to forget. Hugging my grudge, ugly and prickly, a sad sea urchin, I trudged off on my own, in the opposite direction toward the forbidding prison. As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin: I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over."

"“Myshkin was kind, loved everyone, he was tender, always forgave, he never did a wrong thing—but he trusted all the wrong people, made all bad decisions, hurt everyone around him. Very dark message to this book. ‘Why be good.' But—this is what took hold on me last night, riding here in the car. What if—is more complicated than that? What if maybe opposite is true as well? Because, if bad can sometimes come from good actions—? where does it ever say, anywhere, that only bad can come from bad actions? Maybe sometimes—the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want to be? Or, spin it another way, sometimes you can do everything wrong and it still turns out to be right?” “I'm not sure I see your point.” “Well—I have to say I personally have never drawn such a sharp line between ‘good' and ‘bad' as you. For me: that line is often false. The two are never disconnected. One can't exist without the other. As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know “how. But you—wrapped up in judgment, always regretting the past, cursing yourself, blaming yourself, asking ‘what if,' ‘what if.' ‘Life is cruel.' ‘I wish I had died instead of.' Well—think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no—hang on—this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can't get there any other way?” “Get where?” “Understand, by saying ‘God,' I am merely using ‘God' as reference to long-term pattern we can't decipher. Huge, slow-moving weather system rolling in on us from afar, blowing us randomly like—” eloquently, he batted at the air as if at a blown leaf. “But—maybe not so random and impersonal as all that, if you get me.” “Sorry but I'm not really appreciating your point here.” “You don't need a point. The point is maybe that the point is too big to see or work round to on our own.”"

"He pondered and then said, half to himself, “She was going to ram an ongoing car on the Bay Bridge. So I saved him, too; the other car. It might have been like a station wagon full of kids.” “My God,” I said faintly. “It was a decision I had to make in a hurry.” Bill said.” “Once I knew she had that key, I had to do something. It was a big Merc. Silver-colored. Almost new. She had a lot of money. In a situation like that if you don't act, it's the same as helping them.” I said, “It might have been better to tell the doctor.” “No.” He shook his head. “Then she would have-well, it's hard to explain. She knew that I did it to save her life, not to get her in trouble. If I had told the staff-especially if I had told Dr. Gutman-she would have interpreted that as me just trying to get her kept there another couple of months. But this way they never knew, so they didn't hold her any longer than they originally intended to. When I got out-she got out before I did-one time she came by my apartment.""

"Q: Is the sparrow a native of this country? A: It is now, but not long ago there were no sparrows in America. Q: Why were sparrows brought to this country? A: Because the insects were killing so many trees that the sparrows were needed to destroy the insects. Q: Did the sparrows save the trees? A: Yes, the trees were saved. Q: In wintertime when there are no insects and snow is on the ground, does not the sparrow have a hard time? A: Yes, he has a very hard time, and many die of hunger."

"He could barely get out of bed. That’s what he said so he might have meant he wasn’t getting out of bed."

"There was so much excitement! So I immediately realized that this was an exception, because even the nerves of an enormous city like Berlin can't stand such incredible tension every day. But I was swooning and I continued to be swept along — the air was full of excitement. And some people pulled me along, and so we came to stand in front of an elegant hotel that is called Adlon — and everything was covered with people and cops that were pushing and shoving. And then the politicians arrived on the balcony like soft black spots. And everything turned into a scream and the masses swept me over the cops onto the sidewalk and they wanted those politicians to throw peace down to them from the balcony. And I was shouting with them, because so many voices pierced through my body that they came back out of my mouth. And I had this idiotic crying fit, because I was so moved. And so I immediately belonged to Berlin, being right in the middle of it — that pleased me enormously. And the politicians lowered their heads in a statesmanly fashion, and so, in a way, they were greeting me too."

"He must have chosen this particular spot for his smithy probably because he knew of a certain mysterious power latent in the water"

"For the functionary, "to live," means to function within an apparatus that provides him his rights. If the apparatus denies him his rights, it is because it has been badly programmed and is malfunctioning. So it must be fixed. For the functionary, rights are not ethical or political judgements, they are formal judgements. The functionary is formalist according to the dominant ontology. In the post-industrial society it makes no sense to try to distinguish between conservatism and revolution, between right and left: Politics loses all meaning. This seems to indicate that the post-industrial society will be a bureaucracy, a society in which the functionary is dominant. But everything indicates that this is a mistake. Because on the contrary: wherever there is bureaucracy, the post-industrial society is not yet well programmed. So everything indicates that functional programs will dominate the post-industrial society, within which the functionaries will function progressively more like invisible cogwheels inside the black boxes. This will be technocracy. Functionaries are not comparable to the farmers and factory owners of preceding societies, but to the serfs and workers. The apparent dominant class shall be the programmers, although an attentive analysis will also reveal that they too are specialized functionaries. The apparatus will form the real dominant class. It will be an inhuman society."

"He was seemingly born not only with a gift for language, but with a particularly nasty clock which makes him go crazy every three years or so. Beware of gods bearing gifts!"

"Walking finely from the hips the two of us made our way home through the afternoon, impregnating it with the smoke of our cigarettes."

"One of them was a girl named Kasane, which means manifold. I thought her name was somewhat strange but exceptionally beautiful."

"For what it is worth: Slazinger claims to have learned from history that most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening team with a peculiar membership goes to work on them. Otherwise, life will go on exactly as before, no matter how painful, unrealistic, unjust, ludicrous, or downright dumb that life may be. The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise, the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail. The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius—a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in general circulation. “A genius working alone,” he says, “is invariably ignored as a lunatic.” The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find: a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad. “A person like that working alone,” says Slazinger, “can only yearn out loud for changes, but fail to say what their shapes should be.” The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain anything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be. “He will say almost anything in order to be interesting and exciting,” says Slazinger. “Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being as full of shit as a Christmas turkey.”"

"Of course, I thought of the drunkard boy in New Orleans, the one I loved best. Each night at the old sailors' bar, I'd peel the labels off his bottles and try to entice him homeward. But he wouldn't come. Not until light came through the window. That one was so beautiful I used to watch him sleep. If I had to sum up what he did to me, I'd say it was this: he made me sing along to all the bad songs on the radio. Both when he loved me and when he didn't."

"I think about it quite a bit, actually, that look on his face. I think about a lot of things. I think about the first time I ever saw a birch tree; about the last time I saw Julian; about the first sentence that I ever learned in Greek. Χαλεπά τά καλά. Beauty is harsh."

"A spectator to the destruction of my friends, I said to myself; one who records on a notepad the names of those who die, and did not manage to save any of them, not even one."

"Gentlemen, that was a town neither good nor wise, because of what it had suffered. A grievous fate was sent down upon it, and that was why Arras had sinned. Wisdom never goes hand in hand with affliction."

"A belief is a word-like object."

"Albert of course won the argument because the result was truly important to him, while everything was an amusement to de Saxe. He was too rich and bored to attach importance to anything. Once when I came upon him in church by the confessional, he told me that he sinned out of boredom and confessed out of boredom as well. He really was the only great lord in the town of Arras! May he rest in peace."

"She did say, in so many words, that what alerts, alters."

""That may be," he replied softly. "But if I remain alive, a great deal will change. People will conclude that they had been right, and their image of sin will be drawn tight as a bowstring. But the human mind is not a bowstring and should not be drawn taut. When it breaks, Arras will descend into madness. It is a good town, Jan, and it deserved a better fate. I do not wish to be the executioner of this town. Better the town be mine.""

"Oh, he’s not alone, although he thinks he is. A lot of people these days dream they’re being run over or eaten by machines. They’re the cagey ones who won’t go on the subway or the elevators. Coming back from my lunch hour in the hospital cafeteria I often pass them, puffing up the unswept stone stairs to our office on the fourth floor. I wonder, now and then, what dreams people had before ball bearings and cotton mills were invented."

"We stayed there and made shows for many, many Wasichus all that winter. I liked the part of the show we made, but not the part the Wasichus made. Afterwhile I got used to being there, but I was like a man who had never had a vision. I felt dead and my people seemed lost and I thought I might never find them again. I did not see anything to help my people. I could see that the Wasichus did not care for each other the way our people did before the nation’s hoop was broken. They would take everything from each other if they could, and so there were some who had more of everything than they could use, while crowds of people had nothing at all and maybe were starving. They had forgotten that the earth was their mother. This could not be better than the old ways of my people. There was a prisoner’s house on an island where the big water came up to the town, and we saw that one day. Men pointed guns at the prisoners and made them move around like animals in a cage. This made me feel very sad, because my people too were penned up in islands, and maybe that was the way the Wasichus were going to treat them."

"Like the camera, memory is a device and feeling is a device, or a souvenir. The interior of the courtyard lights up. Its doorway becomes a luminous square in the dark, and I can regulate the rate at which a blue wooden bench passes across it, like a car, or returns, when I back up. An apple tree in blossom in the courtyard travels across the screen."

"Throughout his life each of us had submitted to those above him, but when hunger and plague suddenly toppled the ladder of hierarchy into the dung of universal powerlessness, each of us, without exception, discovered that he was separate from the world. We were orphaned and condemned to death, but we were no longer subject to anything except ourselves. A terrible solitude had overtaken us, but there was something sublime about it as well. Hitherto, in living and in dying, all of us, without exception, had been in a state of subjection; and I do not doubt that this state can be full of sweetness and may give us a sense of security. Yet in that state, we make efforts to please others, those above us and those below. Submission is the beauty of our existence. And, in exchange, we receive protection and peace; in a word, it allows us to enjoy life. Without it, fate leaves each of us prey to himself. And so it was that in the hour of agony, a mixture of terrible anguish, despair, and lasciviousness, the citizens of Arras whispered to themselves, "I am the son of man. I am the son of man and nothing more!" This unbearable burden lay heavily upon us, most likely causing our descent to the lowest depths."