Mortal Leap Quotes

“The books were a private part of me that I carried inside and guarded and didn't talk to anybody about; as long as I had the books I could convince myself I was different from the others and my life wasn't quite as stupid and pointless.”
― MacDonald Harris, Mortal Leap

“Alcohol was for people who basically wished to be dead but lacked the courage to kill themselves.”
― MacDonald Harris, Mortal Leap

“Who doesn't have a dark place somewhere inside him that comes out sometimes when he's looking in a mirror? Dark and light, we are all made out of shadows like the shapes on a motion-picture screen. A lot of people think that the function of the projector is to throw light on the screen, just as the function of the story-teller is to stop fooling around and simply tell what happened, but the dark places must be there too, because without the dark places there would be no image and the figure on the screen would not exist.”
― MacDonald Harris, Mortal Leap

“But I know too that if we ever make a world without shadow, if the chemists and scientists and psychologists succeed in abolishing fear, pain, loneliness, death, some of us will find life so intolerable we will probably blow out our brains out of sheer boredom.”
― MacDonald Harris, Mortal Leap

“What happened was simple, even banal: I became naked, died, lost parts of my flesh and most of my ego along with a few illusions such as a belief in the uniqueness of my personal scrap of consciousness and the cosmic importance therof, and went on from there.”
― MacDonald Harris, Mortal Leap

“It was a part of myself that was my enemy; I still had a childish illusion that the flesh on my own bones was somehow unique and precious to the universe, in some obscure corner of my mind I wanted the others to love me and make exceptions for me simply because I felt heat and cold, pain and loneliness as they did. Now this was gone once and for all, and I understood there were no exceptions and on one was invulnerable, we all had to share the same conditions and in the end this was simply mortality, the mortality of things as well as ourselves. After that I didn't expect anybody to love me...”
― MacDonald Harris, Mortal Leap

“I was naked and he had more possessions than he could use all at once. I was the proletarian, he was the capitalist, and my relations to him were reduced to the basic proposition of all revolutions: die, I want what you have. It was the first time in my life I'd taken an interest in politics.”
― MacDonald Harris, Mortal Leap

“I still had the sensation I was playing a role but it didn't bother me any more, because I knew now that everybody else played a role too; it was just that some played them well and some badly.”
― MacDonald Harris, Mortal Leap

“I don't think you have any control over who you are-it just happens. Sometimes in the morning I wake up and don't know who I am. I have to get out of bed and open the closet door, and then I think, oh yes, I'm the girl in the red dress.”
― MacDonald Harris, Mortal Leap

“Is there anybody who would like to have written on his forehead a record of the places where he has slept? We are all innocent, in the end, and all guilty. We move blindly toward our sins, and the things we do and the things we suffer for don't have much to do with each other. In the end there's no justice: the universe is not an auditing firm. Would we like it better if it were? If we had to pay for everything, down to the last cruelty, the last fornication, the last harmless lie? Let's leave the dark places where they are.”
― MacDonald Harris, Mortal Leap

“In other words, you’ve been buying the material surplus and making the units for—let me see—” he began figuring on a scrap of paper—“about seventy-five dollars apiece including labor, you sell them wholesale for a hundred and twenty-nine seventy, and the jobber retails them to the Navy for a hundred and eighty-five dollars.” “After all, this kind of initiative is what made America great.” “Sure, sure.” “Have a drink?” “Don’t mind if I do.”
― MacDonald Harris, Mortal Leap

“Victor was no moralist, he didn’t care if you drank wood alcohol or Sterno, mainlined with heroin or cut up little children, but he had a contempt for anybody who would go to sea all his life and not care enough about it to do the job right.”
― MacDonald Harris, Mortal Leap

“I began to see why Victor drank so little and instead preferred smoking weed. Alcohol was for people who basically wished to be dead but lacked the courage to kill themselves. It was a kind of little suicide; it annihilated you for eight hours during which you had the sweet peace of a corpse and then it gave you another chance, your head thudding and your mouth tasting like a parrot cage to remind you that you had been somewhere.”
― MacDonald Harris, Mortal Leap

“Somewhere on the bottom of the Pacific is a copy of The Forsyte Saga I heaved overboard one afternoon. I very quickly saw what was wrong with it; Galsworthy was a gentleman, and no gentleman would ever write a good book.”
― MacDonald Harris, Mortal Leap

“In San Pedro during the maritime strike in 1939 I watched a lanky pink-faced man with white hair being arrested for reading the Declaration of Independence from a soapbox. They led him away holding up the book and smiling to the crowd, as though it was a private joke he was playing on the police. Somebody said he was a writer. After they had taken him away the crowd began to get ugly; somebody began singing the Internationale and rocks sailed through the air. A cop told me to move on, I stood on my rights as a decent left-wing American citizen, and the cop busted my nose with his nightstick. Evidently they hit you whether you were interested in politics or not. After that I still had no politics, but I decided I was a cop-hater.”
― MacDonald Harris, Mortal Leap

“I had learned how to take care of myself. I had found out that everything I was taught up to the age of seventeen was false, so I decided that nothing was true, or at least it wasn’t worth arguing whether anything was true or not. It”
― MacDonald Harris, Mortal Leap

“still had a childish illusion that the flesh on my own bones was somehow unique and precious to the universe, in some obscure corner of my mind I wanted the others to love me and make exceptions for me simply because I felt heat and cold, pain and loneliness as they did. Now this was gone once and for all, and I understood there were no exceptions and no one was invulnerable, we all had to share the same conditions and in the end this was simply mortality, the mortality of things as well as ourselves. After that I didn’t expect anybody to love me and I understood why Victor kept his money taped to his chest. I got up off the floor impassively and went away without a word. Victor didn’t give me back my money, and neither of us ever mentioned the subject again.”
― MacDonald Harris, Mortal Leap

“I threw a crowbar, a heavy one; it soared end-over-end and vanished softly and invisibly like a bird. “Listen! This is serious!” I yelled. It wasn’t that there was nothing there. It was that the silence was there, a physical presence, and wouldn’t answer. I wouldn’t have minded if there had been no God, then the universe would be empty and all things would be possible. But that He should exist—that He should hover up there looking at me like the fog and be indifferent—was intolerable.”
― MacDonald Harris, Mortal Leap

“Standing in that Oakland street in the fog I made a remarkable discovery: the people I had grown up among had not known very much about sin and so they had overrated it. And then the idea struck me that perhaps Hell was overrated too; it was hard to imagine anyone being punished for what I had just done. And Heaven? Suppose you did as they said, lived virtuously, paid your tithing, went to church every Sunday, and later the ecstasy they promised you turned out to be like going with the Mexican girl: insipid, sweaty, a little boring?”
― MacDonald Harris, Mortal Leap

“It wasn't a matter of convincing these people or anybody else that I was something I was not, or even trying to make myself into something they wanted me to be. It was a matter of myself into something I would decide; of asking myself what was the best I had and what I could make with it, and then working as hard as I could to make it.”
― MacDonald Harris, Mortal Leap

“Taxis! Streets! The city was full of people hurrying somewhere, people who had appointments, jobs, friends, complications, projects, crises. The emotion and intensity of it bewildered me, and the thought that I was going to have to live and move in this world and hurry around like these people made me tired.”
― MacDonald Harris, Mortal Leap

“I wondered if the others felt it too, the pointlessness of everything and the impossibility of changing the way you were, or whether they had somehow managed to come to terms with it in their own way.”
― MacDonald Harris, Mortal Leap