"But, my dear Sebastian, you can't seriously believe it all."
"Can't I?"
"I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass."
"Oh yes, I believe that. It's a lovely idea."
"But you can't believe things because they're a lovely idea."
"But I do. That's how I believe."

Brideshead Revisited,
Evelyn Waugh

Something else comes and it makes me feel weak and scared and fragile and I don't want to be hurt and this feeling is the feeling I have when I know I can be hurt and hurt deeper and more terribly than anything physical and I always fight it and control it and stop it but her voice calms me and her arms warm me and her smell lightens me and I can ( Read more... )

A heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius ( Read more... )

"I actually reached a point where I said to myself, right out loud, like a lunatic, If I hear just one more picky, cavilling, unconstructive word out of you, Franny Glass, you and I are finished--but finished. And for a while I wasn't too bad. For about a whole month, at least, whenever anybody said anything that sounded campusy and phony, or that ( Read more... )

Amazing - there is no sound during conception. No chimes. No fizzing. No horns along the uterine turnpike honking as one swift cell drives headlong into another. Life begins in total silence, a microscopic He or She forming instantaneously, quick as a stereotype, even in its spiritlike simplicity. It dances in limbo. It hugs the shore, developing ( Read more... )

Although I don't feel that it's at all necessary to tell you how I feel about the principle of individuality, I know that I'm going to have to spend the rest of my life expressing it one way or another, and I think that I'll accomplish more by expressing it on the keys of a typewriter than by letting it express itself in sudden outbursts of ( Read more... )

We didn't always use words when we were together; we didn't need to. That was uncanny, but maybe the best thing of all, although I don't think we thought about it much; it just happened. There's a Greek legend-- no, it's in something Plato wrote-- about how true lovers are really two halves of the same person. It says that people wander around ( Read more... )

What changed in us? One year. One semester. Things are ... different. I see things differently. Things are no longer black and white, no longer is there just gray. There's multitudes of color and confusion. Mixing ( Read more... )

Once on a yellow piece of paper with green lines ( Read more... )

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number ( Read more... )