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Happiness is experienced most directly in the intervals between terror.
It is like being an ex-alcoholic. One is able to contemplate nothing else.”
It took Christ to come along and say, ‘Forgive the sons for the sins of the fathers.’ That’s the day, Harry, that scientific inquiry was born. Even if we had to wait a millennium and more for Kepler and Galileo. So, follow the logic: Once the father begins to believe that his sons will not suffer for his acts of sacrilege, he grows bold enough to experiment. He looks upon the universe as a curious place, rather than as an almighty machine guaranteed to return doom for his curiosity. That was the beginning of the technological sleigh ride which may destroy us yet.
Titus and Lavinia, taken together, had lost three of their four hands. The allusion is meaningless, I am certain, except that numbers command their own logic, and Augustus Farr may have been on a promenade that night while Dr. Gardiner and his somnolent Maisie were transported to those underworlds that dwell beneath the navel.
“Well, as I seem to recollect telling you, Christ adjured us to forgive the son for the sins of the father. That’s amnesty. It opened the scientific world. Prior to this divine largesse, how might a man dare to be a scientist?
“Death is the price you pay for enjoying a real war,”
If we die in violence, does a demon come to greet us in the same red light?
To the rest of the world, America is the Garden of Eden. Unmitigated envy, the ugliest emotion of them all.”
There’s the clue. One of the few rules you can count on in our work
is that a story will conform in every detail to its earlier version only if the initial account has been artfully fabricated and carefully repeated.”
“Let’s put it this way. So long as you stay unmarried, take advantage of it. Look for every change of Division they offer you. Broaden your field. Then, when you have the right girl, and I’m talking about a masterpiece like Dorothy, get married. You can’t make COS without that. A Station Chief is his own kind of Ambassador. We’re the embodiment of what foreigners expect of Americans.” He pointed a long finger up from the brandy snifter at a forty-five-degree angle. “You see, I have a thesis. We Americans abroad are engaged in Envy-Control. We’ve shown the globe a way to live that’s clean and
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While she looks over forty, the Russians show their age in ways we do not. Do you know, I believe they take a certain grim satisfaction in wearing their souls on the wrinkled surface of their face. We Americans would, of course, go squeak before we’d ever let anyone have the satisfaction of thinking he was looking into our spiritual depths, but that may be exactly what the Russians have to offer. “I have passed through cataclysmic days, and permitted state horrors to be visited on friends, but I have never lied to my soul.” That is what her face says to me.
“I think freedom consists of being able to walk to work in the morning,”
It was then I kissed her a second time on the cheek, assured her that it had been a remarkable evening and perhaps we would visit the Masarovs together, and made my exit much impressed with the ability of one kiss to conduct me right up to the edge of a possible marriage.
Evil, he had once informed me, was to know what was good, and do one’s best to tamper with it. Whereas wickedness was merely one’s readiness to raise the stakes when one did not know what one was doing.
“Who is the Russian wife, and who is the husband?” “Oh,” he said, “obvious. Russian wife is Russia. Husband is the Party. Some days, one must recognize that Russian wife is at fault. She may deserve her beating. Looks at ground. Won’t move forward. Husband may be drunk, but looks at sky.”
her femininity still contains me in its cloud, but I wonder if I am not dealing with a force that is personal in touch, intimate in shift of voice, but, like the wind, there for everyone.
one fired a bullet into beautiful animals in order to feel nearer to God: To the extent that we were criminal, we could approach the cosmos only by stealing a piece of the Creation—yes,
“Aeschylus says: He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”
