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The guards searched out forbidden tape recorders and waved ticket-holders through with expressions benevolent or inimical, as their natures dictated.
most creatures are pleased to do what their nature dictates.
You are too quick to renounce friendship,
“I need permission from my son to stay up late?” “Who else’s?”
“you will have to learn—and for you it will be hard—that sometimes you can’t do anything. Sometimes you simply can’t.”
We are the total of our longings,
Paul Schafer, who believed one should be able to endure anything, and who believed this of himself most of all,
It seemed that there were still things one could not do. So one did everything else as well as one possibly could and found new things to try, to will oneself to master, and always one realized, at the kernel and heart of things, that the ends of the earth would not be far enough away.
He knew, very well, that the frivolity was only a release from tension, but it wasn’t something to which he had access any more.
Kimberly saw that she was beautiful. But despite the hair, which gleamed like a fire at night under stars, this was not a beauty that warmed one. It cut, like a weapon. There was no nuance of gentleness in her, no shading of care, but fair she was, as is the flight of an arrow before it kills.
sometimes plodding caution will wear down brilliance.
“It is power that teaches patience; holding power, I mean. And you learn the price it exacts—which
“I am heavy company at night,” he said. “Especially tonight. Too much comes back. I have too many memories.”
There was a girl in the yard, drawing water from a well. The westering sun slanted upon her dark hair. When she turned at the sound of his footstep, he saw that her eyes were grey. She smiled shyly when, hat in hand, he asked for a drink, and before she had finished drawing it for him, John Ford had fallen in love, simply and irrevocably, which was his nature in all things.
To drink of that water is to taste of whatever light is falling down upon it, whether of sun or moon or stars.
What is the use of living so long if one hasn’t grown wise?”
There are kinds of action, for good or ill, that lie so far outside the boundaries of normal behavior that they force us, in acknowledging that they have occurred, to restructure our own understanding of reality. We have to make room for them.
It was not a bad thing to learn what hurt meant, and mastering it alone helped engender self-respect.
did all fathers feel this way when their sons became men? Men of achievement, of names that eclipsed the father’s? Was there always the sting of envy to temper the burst of pride?
When you didn’t say a lot, he thought, you said the important things.
