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You can boast about anything if it’s all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.
And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.
When a child first catches adults out—when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just—his world falls into panic desolation. The
gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.
The humilities are piled on a soldier, so Cyrus said, in order that he may, when the time comes, be not too resentful of the final humility—a meaningless and dirty death.
But Adam saved it for a time, and whenever he read it again it gave him a chill and he didn’t know why.
I can see it pretty clearly. I can see how you loved him and what it did to you. I did not love him. Maybe he loved me. He tested me and hurt me and punished me and finally he sent me out like a sacrifice, maybe to make up for something. But he did not love you, and so he had faith in you. Maybe—why, maybe it’s a kind of reverse.”
“I didn’t know then, but I know now—you were fighting for your love.”
I BELIEVE THERE ARE MONSTERS BORN in the world to human parents. Some you can see, misshapen and horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies; some are born with no arms, no legs, some with three arms, some with tails or mouths in odd places. They are accidents and no one’s fault, as used to be thought. Once they were considered the visible punishments for concealed sins.
You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.
A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief.
that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.
It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.
One says the silent man is the wise man and the other that a man without words is a man without thought.
Her faith is
a mountain, and you, my son, haven’t even got a shovel yet.”
“I don’t very much believe in blood,” said Samuel. “I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing only what he planted in them after they cleared the womb.”
“You can’t make a race horse of a pig.” “No,” said Samuel, “but you can make a very fast pig.”
And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him. And Cain went out from the presence of the
Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod on the east of Eden.’ ”
“Well, every little boy thinks he invented sin. Virtue we think we learn, because we are told about it. But sin is our own designing.”
“Did you listen? Cain bore the mark not to destroy him but to save him. And there’s a curse called down on any man who shall kill him. It was a preserving mark.”
“But Cain lived and had children, and Abel lives only in the story. We are Cain’s children.
a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting—only the deeply personal and familiar.” Samuel said, “Apply that to the Cain-Abel story.”
“I think this is the best-known story in the world because it is everybody’s story. I think it is the symbol story of the human soul.
The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt—and there is the story of mankind.
Thou shalt’ and ‘Do thou.’ And this was the gold from our mining: ‘Thou mayest.’ ‘Thou mayest rule over sin.’
“The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’—that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’ Don’t you see?”
Now, there are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, ‘Do thou,’ and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in ‘Thou shalt.’ Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But ‘Thou mayest’! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.”
But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is
a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed— because ‘Thou mayest.’ ”
In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world. We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending
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