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Next to the photograph of a little cross-eyed girl in long white stockings, Camilla was left with Castile laid out at her feet, the harsh surface of its plain as indifferent to memory of what has passed upon it as the sea.
He did no better convincing them that a man had died on a tree to save them all: an act which one old Indian, if Gwyon had translated correctly, regarded as “rank presumption.”
He did no better convincing them that a man had died on a tree to save them all: an act which one old Indian, if Gwyon had translated correctly, regarded as “rank presumption.”
but there are miracles of such wondrous proportions that they must be kept, guarded from ears so wanting in grace that disbelief blooms into ridicule.
He stood there unsteady in the cold, mumbling syllables which almost resolved into her name, as though he could recall, and summon back, a time before death entered the world, before accident, before magic, and before magic despaired, to become religion.
On the hill in San Zwingli the rain beat against the figure crucified in stone over the gate, arms flung out like a dancer. It beat against the bóveda, vault upon vault, bead flowers and metal wreaths, broken stems and glass broken like the glass in a picture frame over a name and a pitiful span of years where the cross-eyed girl in white stockings waited beside Camilla, and the water streamed into the empty vaults.
False dawn past, the sun prepared the sky for its appearance, and there, a shred of perfection abandoned unsuspecting at the earth’s rim, lay the curve of the old moon, before the blaze which would rise behind it to extinguish the cold quiet of its reign.
just as the sun sped up over the margin of the earth in the miracle of its appearance and then, assured in its accomplishment, climbed slowly into day.
Thomas’s account of the child Jesus turning his playmates into goats;
—The great satisfaction of seeing someone else punished for a deed of which we know ourselves capable. —But I . . . —What is more gratifying than this externalizing of our own evils? Another suffering in atonement for the vileness of our own imaginings . . . —Stop it! cried Aunt May, —I’m sure I have never had such thoughts. —Then how can you judge her crime, if you have never been so tempted? he asked quietly.
It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least.
At such an age, the Blood of the Lamb provoked no pleasant prospect for bathing; and resurrection a dispensable preoccupation for one who had not yet lived.
As men whose sons are born to them late in life do often, he regarded Wyatt from a wondering distance, saw in his behavior a phantasy of perfect logic demonstrating those parts of himself which had had to grow in secret.
—Ask your father what Homoousian means . . . But a good half-hour later she found him, standing still in the hall outside the study door, whispering, —Homoousian? . . . Homo-oisian? . .
She waited, contemplating wholesale damnation for the whole non-Christian world with an eye as level as that of Saint Bonaventura: no more mother than he, the prospect of eternal roasting for millions of unbaptized children did not bring the flutter of an eyelash:
for as day and night divide the whole of our time, so heaven and hell divide all our thoughts, words, and actions.
A few days later, Wyatt began to recover. He regained the weight of his body by meticulous ounces. That fever had passed; but for the rest of his life it never left his eyes.
—There’s something about a . . . an unfinished piece of work, a . . . a thing like this where . . . do you see? Where perfection is still possible? Because it’s there, it’s there all the time, all the time you work trying to uncover it.
baffled by the grandeur of their own culture which they could not define, and so believed did not exist,
—Why bother to go all the way to the top, I haven’t got my camera.
Still, a dull day in the fall, a day which had lost track of the sun and the importunate rendition of minutes and hours the sun dictates, and that configuration on Montmartre stood out in preternatural whiteness, the ceremonial specter of a peak, an abrupt Alp in the wrong direction.
the secure anonymity of childhood recalled by the fall of the year,
Empty pavilions colonnaded on a hill across the river witnessed the afternoon pleasure of a child who had been called away, and left this glittering plaything for the wind to tear.
The streets, when he came out, were filled with people recently washed and dressed, people for whom time was not continuum of disease but relentless repetition of consciousness and unconsciousness, unrelated as day and night, or black and white, evil and good, in independent alternation, like the life and death of insects.
This can happen: staying awake, the absolutes become confused, time the patient seen at full living length, in exhaustion. One afternoon he went to sleep, woke alone at twilight, believed he had slept the night through, lost it, here was dawn. He went out for coffee. The streets were full, but unevenly. There was a pall on every face, a gathering of remnants in suspicion of the end, a melancholia of things completed. Wyatt, haggard as he was, looked with such wild uncomprehending eyes on a day beginning so, that he attracted the attention of a policeman who stopped him.
It was the dead heat of Paris summer, when Paris cats go to sleep on Paris windowsills, and ledges high up, and fall off, and plunge through the glass roof of the lavabo.
Her husband, on the other hand, did not seem to care where his books were, so long as they were where he put them.
she saw him standing, running the fingers of his right hand over his rough chin, up one cheek and then the other, as though to wake after the night needing a shave made sense, but finding his face rough with growth after a day’s well-lighted consciousness a strange thing.
“That romantic disease, originality, all around we see originality of incompetent idiots, they could draw nothing, paint nothing, just so the mess they make is original . . . Even two hundred years ago who wanted to be original, to be original was to admit that you could not do a thing the right way, so you could only do it your own way.
—I wish we were in the dark, you can talk to me in the dark, in the light you tell me things like . . . Zero doesn’t exist.
What did you want of him that you didn’t get from his work?
this passion for wanting to meet the latest poet, shake hands with the latest novelist, get hold of the latest painter, devour . . . what is it? What is it they want from a man that they didn’t get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he’s done his work? What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology.
There was a man of double deed, it commenced, Sowed his garden full of seed. When the seed began to grow, ’Twas like a garden full of snow; When the snow began to melt, ’Twas like a ship without a belt; When the ship began to sail, ’Twas like a bird without a tail; When the bird began to fly, —Esther! ’Twas like an eagle in the sky; When the sky began to roar, ’Twas like a lion at the door; —Esther . . . When the door began to crack, ’Twas like a stick across my back; When my back began to smart . . . —Esther, what is it? What are you doing here? ’Twas like a penknife in my heart; When my
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The lust of summer gone, the sun made its visits shorter and more uncertain, appearing to the city with that discomfited reserve, that sense of duty of the lover who no longer loves.
—And who are you going to be miserable with New Year’s Eve?
people . . . the instant you look at them they begin to talk, automatically, they take it for granted you understand them, that you recognize them, that they have something to say to you, and you have to wait, you have to pretend to listen, pretend you don’t know what’s coming next while they go right on talking with no idea what they’re talking about, they don’t even know but they go right on, trying to explain who they are because they take it for granted you want to know, not that they have the damnedest idea as far as that goes, they just want to know what kind of a receptacle you’ll be
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They swayed a little, standing in the doorway, still holding each other together in a way of holding each other back: they still waited, being moved over the surface of time like two swells upon the sea, one so close upon the other that neither can reach a peak and break, until both, unrealized, come in to shatter coincidentally upon the shore.
following ants through the desert to see if they’re guided by the stars,
—That’s what it is, this arrogance, in this flamenco music this same arrogance of suffering, listen. The strength of it’s what’s so overpowering, the self-sufficiency that’s so delicate and tender without an instant of sentimentality. With infinite pity but refusing pity, it’s a precision of suffering,
—Completely consumed moments, when you’re working and lose all consciousness of yourself . . . Oh? she said . . . Do you call that happiness?
They write for people who read with the surface of their minds, people with reading habits that make the smallest demands on them, people brought up reading for facts, who know what’s going to come next and want to know what’s coming next, and get angry at surprises.
we have to act because that’s the only way we can know we’re real, and that it has to be moral action because that’s the only way we can know other people are.
The plot still needs a little tightening up. (By this Otto meant that a plot of some sort had yet to be supplied, to motivate the series of monologues in which Gordon, a figure who resembled Otto at his better moments, and whom Otto greatly admired, said things which Otto had overheard, or thought of too late to say.)
Grdn: We hate thngs only becse in thm we see elemnts whch we secrtly hate in rslves,
God devotes as much time to a moment as He does to an hour,
trembling before everything that doesn’t happen, weeping for everything we’ll never lose.
Has there ever been anything in history so exquisitely private as the Virgin mourning over Her Son?
Unprofaned, the word Christ embarrassed him.
A woman is always waiting. She’s . . . always waiting.
—Esther it isn’t the secrecy, the darkness everywhere, so much as the lateness. I mean I get used to myself at night, it takes that long sometimes. The first thing in the morning I feel sort of undefined, but by midnight you’ve done all the things you have to do, I mean all the things like meeting people and, you know, and paying bills, and by night those things are done because by then there’s nothing you can do about them if they aren’t done, so there you are alone and you have the things that matter, after the whole day you can sort of take everything that’s happened and go over it alone. I
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