Maybe that’s what’s waiting for us at the end of the journey, a majesty unimaginable until the very moment we find ourselves walking through the doors of it, what we find ourselves gazing at in astoni...
Living things don’t last—it’s all temporary. Death in life. That’s why they’re called natures mortes. Maybe you don’t see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you...
Light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.
Just as it was reassuring to know that far away, whales swam untroubled in Baltic waters and monks in arcane time zones chanted ceaselessly for the salvation of the world.
It may be a superhuman effort to lose oneself so completely, but that’s nothing compared to the effort of getting oneself back again
It felt adult, sophisticated, slightly alcoholic.
It better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?
Is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons. —SCHILLER
Hubris on Henry’s, too much Greek prose composition—whatever
His unhappiness was our fault. My mother and I got on his nerves. It was because of us he had a job he couldn’t stand. Everything we did was irritating. He particularly didn’t enjoy being around me, n...
He said well if you can’t plan it out ahead of time, you’ll just have to work it out as you go along
He had an indefinable look of privilege gone wrong,
Hard to believe that the world had ended and yet somehow these ridiculous activities kept grinding on.
Happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end—and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it’s possible to play it with a kind of joy?
Great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to ch...
Good doesn't always follow from good deeds, nor bad deeds result from bad, does it? Even the wise and good cannot see the end of all actions.
Gallows
Four hundred years before us, four hundred years after we’re gone—it’ll never strike anybody the same way and the great majority of people it’ll never strike in any deep way at all but—a really great...
Even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open.
Enough to show the black