The Salamander Quotes

“I love you and I miss you; but I dare not let myself depend on the loving, and I must get used to the missing.”
― Morris L. West, The Salamander

“I understood, vividly, the frustration of the revolutionary who wanted to sweep the whole mess out of existence and begin again. I understood the despair of the young, who wanted to drop out, like the Poverello of Assisi, and live in fraternal simplicity on cannabis and corn-bread. I understood the seductive illusion of dictatorship: that one messianic man armed with plenary power could impose order and unity with a wave of his sceptre. More slowly, I began to see Bruno Manzini's belief that we were all prisoners of our genes and our history and that our future was written by scribes long perished.”
― Morris L. West, The Salamander

“he knew, and knew profoundly. He enjoyed. He savoured. He had made his own sense of the mad mathematics of creation.”
― Morris L. West, The Salamander

“A new conviction was crystallizing out of the murky fluid of my own thoughts. There was no cure for the human condition because every man read the present and plotted the future in the light of his own past. There was no such thing as a clean start, because no one truly forgave and no one wholly forgot. In the end, the folk memory betrayed us all. The wrongs of the fathers were revenged on the children.”
― Morris L. West, The Salamander

“We don't have a government, friend. We have parties, factions, warring interests; and the man in the street doesn't know where to turn. Who represents a government to him? A cop who walks away from a traffic jam; some little clerk in the pensions office who slams a window in his face.”
― Morris L. West, The Salamander