Marvin

“Things repeat themselves: people, life, death. But here God is the cameraman's boss, Thomas Alva Edison, he who has done the old biblical Lord one better: made sound that outlasts the life of the voice, light that knows no darkness, and now has made people who do not die, whose images shall remain forever on the earth in celluloid. And, from that which he has created, the light and the phonograph and the moving pictures and so much else, he has made what any true God must make here in America. Money. Piles of the stuff. (343-44)”
― Jonathan Lowy, The Temple of Music: A Novel

“You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.--Quoted in Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood”
― Rebecca West

“History as far as I can see is not the arrangement of what happens, in sequence and in truth, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth.
History needs to be mightily inventive about human life because bare life is an accusation against man's dominion of the earth.
My own story, anyone's own story, is always told against me, even what I myself am writing here, because I have no heroic history to offer. There is no difficulty not of my own making. The heart and the soul, so beloved of God, are both filthied up by residence here, how can we avoid it? . . . It is strange. I suppose therefore God is the connoisseur of filthied hearts and souls, and can see the old, first pattern in them, and cherish them for that.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“I don’t believe in anything except this one thing: where you are. Everybody has a place: that’s all I believe in. Whether you call it home or not, whether it is where you end up or where you started or somewhere in between, everybody has a place. Like where animals go to hide, to sleep, to die (292).”
― James Robertson, News of the Dead