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November 5 - November 16, 2018
Almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic.
The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrödinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future—indeed Schrödinger’s most famous thought-experiment goes to show that the “future,” on the quantum level, cannot be predicted—but to describe reality, the present world.
Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don’t tell you what you will see and hear.
In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it.
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words. Words can be used thus paradoxically because they have, along with a semiotic usage, a symbolic or metaphoric usage.
the politician is very often something less than an integral man.
a musty chill on the air as if the drafts blew in not from other rooms but from other centuries.
“The unknown,” said Faxe’s soft voice in the forest, “the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on.
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.
To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not.
As all the stars may be reflected in a round raindrop falling in the night: so too do all the stars reflect the raindrop.
It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.
Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.
I know beyond doubt what the real center of my own life is, that time that is past and lost and yet is permanent, the enduring moment, the heart of warmth.
Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
But it was from the difference between us, not from the affinities and likenesses, but from the difference, that that love came: and it was itself the bridge, the only bridge, across what divided us.
A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.
It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness . . .
I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend’s voice arises, and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?
the crime of Judas lies not in his betrayal of Christ but in the act that, sealing despair, denies the chance of forgiveness, change, life: his suicide.
