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Reading and script writing were prized in my family not only for information and pleasure but also as a defiant political act since historically so much effort had been used to keep us from learning.
How would they feel having trekked all that way from chains into freedom only to be told, “This here is Paradise but you can’t come in.”
Modern paradise has four of Milton’s characteristics: beauty, plenty, rest, exclusivity. Eternity seems to be forsworn.
Plenty should not be understood as a paradise-only state, but as normal, everyday, humane life.
Other than outwitting evil, waging war against the unworthy, there seems to be nothing for the inhabitants of paradise to do. An open, borderless, come-one-come-all paradise, without dread, minus a nemesis is no paradise at all.
“Scary things not always outside. Most scary things is inside.”
Mavis was reminded of her sixth-grade teacher opening a book: lifting the corner of the binding, stroking the edge to touch the bookmark, caressing the page, letting the tips of her fingers trail down the lines of print. The melty-thigh feeling she got watching her.
quaesumus, da propitius pacem in diebus nostris
we beseech Thee, and grant us peace in our days
et a peccato simus semper liberi can’t you ab omni perturbatione securi…”
“Women always the key, God bless ’em.”
he felt as though his relationship with the God he spoke to was vague or too new, while hers was superior, ancient and completely sealed.
Moonlight arches his back; sunlight warms her tongue.
the black couple of Wish, Arizona.
does this place exist?
rock formation that looked like a man and a woman making out. He
there was a lake in the middle of a wheat field. And that near this lake two trees grew in each other’s arms. And if you squeezed in between them in just the right way, well, you would feel an ecstasy no human could invent or duplicate. “They say after that can’t nobody turn you down.” “Nobody turns me down now.” “Nobody? I mean no-o-body!” “Where is this place?” “Ruby. Ruby, Oklahoma. Way out in the middle of nowhere.”
tourist trap ;)
Who died?” “A love,” said the woman. “I had two; she was the first and the last.”
sky—unignorable, custom-made, designer sky. Not empty either but full of breath and all the eye was meant for.
They hugged and Mavis surrendered to the thump of the woman’s heart against her own.
Quit calling him an ex-slave like that’s all he was. He was also an ex–lieutenant governor, an ex-banker, an ex-deacon and a whole lot of other exes, and he wasn’t making his own way; he was part of a whole group making their own way.”
he is more than an ex-slave
“Everybody born in slavery time wasn’t a slave. Not the way you mean it.”
“We’re here not just to talk but to listen too.”
nobody is going to come along some eighty years later claiming to know better what men who went through hell to learn knew.
That Oven already has a history. It doesn’t need you to fix it.”
“You can’t be God, boy.” Nathan DuPres spoke kindly as he shook his head. “It’s not being Him, sir; it’s being His instrument, His justice.
His instrument - yes
The night sky, like a handsome lid, held the perfume down, saving it, intensifying it, refusing it the slightest breeze on which to escape.
like the flowers—driven by desire, not necessity.
Thing was, when he came, she talked nonsense. Things she didn’t know were on her mind. Pleasures, worries, things unrelated to the world’s serious issues. Yet he listened intently to whatever she said. By a divining she could not explain, she knew that once she asked him his name, he would never come again.
Not hoping or looking for him, but content to know he had and would come by there—for a chat, a bite, cool water on a parched afternoon. Her only fear was that someone else would mention him, appear in his company, or announce a prior claim to his friendship. No one did. He seemed hers alone.
aside from giving up his wealth, can a rich man be a good one?
After a while he sat all the way down, holding his hat in his hand, his head bowed, trying to listen, stay awake, understand.
Only once did someone gather courage to ask Big Papa how long it might take. “This is God’s time,” he answered. “You can’t start it and you can’t stop it. And another thing: He’s not going to do your work for you, so step lively.”
while Ruby thrived, anger smallpoxed other places.
Maybe they ought to go back to the way they did things when her babies were new. When everybody was too busy building, stocking, harvesting to quarrel or think up devilment.
A utility became a shrine (cautioned against not only in scary Deuteronomy but in lovely Corinthians II as well) and, like anything that offended Him, destroyed its own self.
She liked the smell of him. Windy-wet and grassy.
so eager were they to get away from the peace they found dull, the industry they found tedious and the heat they found insulting.
new commitments had been sworn, laws introduced but most of it was decorative: statues, street names, speeches.
it was getting harder and harder to watch and sleep at the same time.
Eyes like those were not uncommon. In hospitals they belonged to patients who paced day and night; on the road, unconfined, people with eyes like that would walk forever.
Never heard that clear yearning call, sustained, rhythmic. It was like an anthem, a lullaby, or the bracing chords of the decalogue.
lovely
Mrs. Fox’s Bal à Versailles was irresistible.
The humiliation made surrender deep, tender. Long-lasting.
“Let me tell you about love, that silly word you believe is about whether you like somebody or whether somebody likes you or whether you can put up with somebody in order to get something or someplace you want or you believe it has to do with how your body responds to another body like robins or bison or maybe you believe love is how forces or nature or luck is benign to you in particular not maiming or killing you but if so doing it for your own good. “Love is none of that. There is nothing in nature like it. Not in robins or bison or in the banging tails of your hunting dogs and not in
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Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God.
if you are a good and diligent student you may secure the right to show love. Love is not a gift. It is a diploma. A diploma conferring certain privileges: the privilege of expressing love and the privilege of receiving it. “How do you know you have graduated? You don’t. What you do know is that you are human and therefore educable, and therefore capable of learning how to learn, and therefore interesting to God, who is interested only in Himself which is to say He is interested only in love. Do you understand me? God is not interested in you. He is interested in love and the bliss it brings
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Love is not a gift. It is a diploma. A diploma conferring certain privileges: the privilege of expressing love and the privilege of receiving it.
The light falling from the April sky was a gift.
the shouts of sugar-drunk children;
what love was: unmotivated respect.
Like sugar turning from unreasonable delight to the body’s mortal enemy, his craving for her had poisoned him, rendered him diabetic, stupid, helpless.
that's sugar for you
