Mari > Mari's Quotes

“War is not two great armies meeting in the clash and frenzy of battle. War is a boy being carried on a stretcher, looking up at God’s blue sky with bewildered eyes that are soon to close; war is a woman carrying a child that has been injured by a shell; war is spirited horses tied in burning buildings and waiting for death; war is the flower of a race, battered, hungry, bleeding, up to its knees in filthy water; war is an old woman burning a candle before the Mater Dolorsa for the son she has given.”
― Mary Rinehart

“Our treatment of animals and our attitude toward them are crucial not only to any pretensions we have to ethical behavior but the humankind's intellectual and moral evolution. Which is how the human animal is meant to evolve, isn't it?”
― Joy Williams, Ill Nature

“Good writing never soothes or comforts. It is no prescription, neither is it diversionary, although it can and should enchant while it explodes in the reader's face.”
― Joy Williams, Ill Nature

“Perhaps the human race had yet to be born. Perhaps it was all a deception by the government. It hadn't happened yet. This life was nothing but the womb.”
― Joy Williams, The Changeling

“Memory is the resurrection. The dead move among us the living in our memory and that is the resurrection.”
― Joy Williams, The Changeling

“Pearl suspected God didn't love human beings much. She suspected that what He loved most was Nothingness.”
― Joy Williams, The Changeling

“The writer doesn’t want to disclose or instruct or advocate, he wants to transmute and disturb. He cherishes the mystery, he cares for it like a fugitive in his cabin, his cave. He
doesn’t want to talk it into giving itself up. He would never turn it in to the authorities, the mass mind. The writer is somewhat of a fugitive himself, actually. He wants to escape his time, the obligations of his time, and, by writing, transcend
them. The writer does not like to follow orders, not even the orders of his own organizing intellect.”
― Joy Williams

“...deeds are done which appear so evil to us and people suffer such terrible evils that it does not seem as though any good will ever come of them; and we consider this, sorrowing and grieving over it so that we cannot find peace in the blessed contemplation of God as we should do; and this is why: our reasoning powers are so blind now, so humble and so simple, that we cannot know the high, marvelous wisdom, the might and the goodness of the Holy Trinity. And this is what he means where he says, 'You shall see for yourself that all manner of things shall be well', as if he said, 'Pay attention to this now, faithfully and confidently, and at the end of time you will truly see it in the fullness of joy.”
― Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

“The world of dew
is the world of dew.
And yet, and yet--”
― Issa Kobayashi, The Dumpling Field: Haiku of Issa

“It is not down on any map; true places never are.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale