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For one thing, he thought that all those infinite stars and planets were alive: animals, he calls them. And they went around in their circles because they wanted to. Anyway
Angels?
Mind, at the center of all, contains within it all that it is the center
‘See, what you have to remember in thinking about the Renaissance is that they were always looking back. All their scholarship, all their learning, was bent toward re-creating as best they could the past in the present, because the past had necessarily been better, wiser, less decayed than the present. And so the older an old manuscript was, the older the knowledge it contained, the better it must turn out to be, once it had been cleansed of the accretions and errors of later times: the closer to the old Golden Age.
‘And somehow – I don’t know exactly how – somehow it all descends to me. Somehow this intensely magical, other-worldly, imaginary country comes to me, is revealed to me, in Kentucky, through books of different kinds, through the goddamn air maybe. But at the same time I knew about the actual historical Egypt too, about which real knowledge has been accumulating through the centuries; I knew about mummies and King Tut and Ra and Isis and Osiris and the Nile rising and all those slaves hauling blocks of stone. So what it seemed like to me was that there were two different countries, somehow near
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‘We never really got to talk.’ She regarded him, cheek in hand, and seemed to remember an old smile she had once kept for him. ‘I thought about you so much, these last few weeks. Lots of stuff. I wondered: did you ever come up with that third wish?’
Beautiful.
She felt it still, that certainty, just as she still felt the burn on her shoulders and the sweet tone of her muscles. She should tell him: and tell him too that her certainty itself was part of what was calling that drowned world back: like calling to like. She should.
Is this a reference to the power of will to change the world around you?
but to hear those notions in another’s mouth, unqualified, fitted to a different kind of consciousness, made them sound at once loony and banal, too much and not enough.
Ideas lose some of their shine when crystallised.
‘Travel backward to a lost land heard of in childhood; find it to be incomprehensible, rich, strange; then discover it is the place from which you set out.’
The point of origin, our point of departure will always be wreathed in nostalgia. The further we move into the future, the rosier the past looks.
It took me some time to figure out that love is in the details. It’s in the books and records and the stereo and the convertible. Love is always in the details. And that’s where the pain is too.’
know it’s a big prison. Destinies. Stars. Signs. Houses. Little words and verbs. All that you’re saying, Val, with all of that stuff, is This is the way you’re stuck. But you’re not stuck. There’s a word for all of this stuff you work with: Heimarmene. A Greek word. It means fate or destiny, but it means prison too.
So we get a glimpse of the pattern. Giordano Bruno speaks of ascending beyond the limits of fate, and Beau believes the same
Beau and he looked quizzically at each other for a time, each trying to remember where and when he had met the other, and failing. Then Pierce Moffett turned and left.
Something to wish for: something else to wish for, something different from what could be reflected in a mirror above a broad bed . . . If he could wish now, he would wish for something to wish for.
While i understand the effort taken to write this novel, the abstractions seem to make the chracters shallower rather than more compellng
‘I’d like to take this mirror,’ she said. ‘If I can.’ ‘No.’ She sat up slowly, smiling but wary. ‘It’s mine,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it?’ ‘It was a gift,’ he said. ‘From me. To us.’
stuff. all the love is in the stuff
‘You’ll grow up to be strong, won’t you, yes, and manly, and innocent; and if you want to do deeds of knighthood, oh don’t let them stop you, don’t. Oh don’t.’
The term innocent is used repeatedly in a very loose sense for pierce. he is only an overgrown child
That’s the interesting thing, that’s the subject: not why there are ley-lines, but why people find them; not what plan the aliens had for us, but why we think there must, somehow, always have been a plan.
Deprived of meaning a man might wither and die as surely as if deprived of food or water.
Or it might be – it was a thought that had occurred to him before, usually when he had just called one of his loves by the name of one of the others, a thing which he and all men did and which no woman that he knew of ever did – it might be that there was only one woman in the world to whom he was attracted, one woman for him, and she kept showing up in his life in different forms, with different names, disguised as herself.
Really? you arrogant prick why exactly do you think your life is so important
Man fell: and mingled his substance with Nature’s matter: and came to be earthy, bound up in love and sleep, and subject to heimarmene and the Spheres.
The mind makes itself visible in the act of thinking, just as God makes himself visible in the act of creating.
have a secret he could impart, a secret that had cost him not a little in the learning, if they would just sit still to hear it. He
Infinite. You made yourself equal to the stars by knowing your mother Earth was a star as well; you rose up through the spheres not by leaving the earth but by sailing it: by knowing that it sailed.
The path that way – it brought his heart to his mouth to trace it – traversed the mountainsides switching back and forth like a whip; you could see, far far below, the turns you would have to take, and the travelers there who toiled upward. Along the fingernail of silver path that edged the precipice a shepherd walked his sheep along in a single file.
