J. Mulrooney > J.'s Quotes

“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibits with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like a cat-show, but the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell.”
― Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination

“He is looking down into the toilet bowl. He sees a bright shiny red ball, about the size of his fist, covered with blood and bobbing jauntily in the yellowed water. It throbs in time
with Ernest’s pulse. It is his heart.”
― J. Mulrooney, The Day Immanuel Kant was Late: Philosophical Fables, Pious Tales, and Other Stories

“And he told Stink about a saint he had tempted a thousand generations ago. Satan had mocked the Enemy’s ridiculous claim of omnipotence. “Does God have the power to make a rock so big that he cannot move it?” Satan asked. The saint looked at him. “Yes,” he said. “And then He would pick it up.”
― J. Mulrooney, The Day Immanuel Kant was Late: Philosophical Fables, Pious Tales, and Other Stories

“For these were the days when Time was still the horizon of beauty and had not yet begun its slow inexorable destructions.”
― J. Mulrooney, The Day Immanuel Kant was Late: Philosophical Fables, Pious Tales, and Other Stories

“He had been naïve, he realized: in those days he still had the idea that people would avoid Hell if you let them. Now he knew better. People will find their own way to Hell even if you beat them with a stick to go the other way.”
― J. Mulrooney, An Equation of Almost Infinite Complexity

“He might mention something about a seed growing into a tree or the sun rising after it sets, but in just the sort of way that made you stop and say, "Heavy duty.”
― J. Mulrooney, An Equation of Almost Infinite Complexity

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“To love someone means to see them as God intended them.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“There are three possible parts to a date, of which at least two must be offered: entertainment, food, and affection. It is customary to begin a series of dates with a great deal of entertainment, a moderate amount of food, and the merest suggestion of affection. As the amount of affection increases, the entertainment can be reduced proportionately. When the affection IS the entertainment, we no longer call it dating. Under no circumstances can the food be omitted.”
― Judith Martin

“If you can't be kind, at least be vague.”
― Judith Martin

“Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization. We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations