when they both asked me “Is he going to be okay?” I said he would most certainly be okay. I emphasized this, because I did not know myself—except what choice did he have, what choice do most of us have, except to be okay?


“Sometimes at midnight, in the great silence of the sleep bound town, the doctor turned on his radio before going to bed for the few hours' sleep he allowed himself. And from the ends of the earth, across thousands of miles of land and sea, kindly, well-meaning speakers tried to voice their fellow-feeling, and indeed did so, but at the same time proved the utter incapacity of every man truly to share in the suffering that he cannot see. "Oran! Oran!" In vain the call rang over oceans, in vain Rieux listened hopefully; always the tide of eloquence began to flow, bringing home still more the unbridgeable gulf that lay between Grand and the speaker. "Oran, we're with you!" they called emotionally. But not, the doctor told himself, to love or to die together-- and that's the only way...”
― The Plague
― The Plague

“For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.”
― Summer in Algiers
― Summer in Algiers

“I like to think that it isn't weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, ...”
― Atonement
― Atonement

“You ever wonder what a Martian might think if he happened to land near an emergency room? He’d see an ambulance whizzing in and everybody running out to meet it, tearing the doors open, grabbing up the stretcher, scurrying along with it. ‘Why,’ he’d say, ‘what a helpful planet, what kind and helpful creatures.’ He’d never guess we’re not always that way; that we had to, oh, put aside our natural selves to do it. ‘What a helpful race of beings,’ a Martian would say. Don’t you think so?”
― The Accidental Tourist
― The Accidental Tourist

“Why are the Fens flat? So God has a clear view...”
― Waterland
― Waterland
Phil’s 2022 Year in Books
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