Luke Mohan’s Reviews > Vipers' Tangle > Status Update

Can it be that, from long habit, he picks and chooses from among her gestures and her words, keeping for use only those that feed his grievances and perpetuate his resentments? There is a fatal tendency in all of us to simplify others, to eliminate in them everything that might soften the indictment, give some human lineaments to the caricature that our hatred craves in order to justify itself....

Husbands and wives of long standing never hate one another as much as they think they do.

“A shooting star!” cried Phili: “I had no time to make a wish.”
“One never does have time,” said Janine.

But when a man is as hard as I am… when he can inspire only hatred and create about himself nothing but a wasteland, then he has no defense against the onrush of hope…

Perhaps, only if we have conquered the body can we believe in the body’s resurrection. The punishment of those who have abused it is that they cannot even imagine that it will rise again.

"However long your life, you will never know any bliss comparable to these few hours. Drink them to the dregs...Quench your thirst once and for all, for you will never again have an opportunity to drink."

The love that I felt was all mixed up with the love that I inspired—or thought I inspired. There was nothing real about my own feelings. What counted for me was my belief in the love that you felt. I caught my reflection in the mirror of somebody else's personality, and in the image thus presented there was nothing repulsive. In that blissful state of relaxation I blossomed and flowered.

x. The darkness of human sin cannot finally affect God‘s persistent calling of men and women toward love.