“He would not let them embrace any single belief. They took in all the data of tradition with none of its structure. They had the perfect doubleness for the arts, to be inside and outside.”
“James Joyce said paternity is not necessarily a matter of blood. I think that part of the journey of our spirits is to find our fathers.” D. Milch - ‘Life’s Work’
“When I worked in a foundry, I remember a color I loved in the crucible of melted brass. Her hair was that color and her warm body seemed to reflect it just as the caster’s face glows above the poured molds.” L. Cohen
"War is a purifying and ennobling force. The question is whether only people like ourselves here are fitted to be soldiers or whether the different services have formed us"
"The last moment had come, the last drops had to be drained! So a man will sometimes go through half an hour of mortal terror with a brigand, yet when the knife is at his throat at last, he feels no fear."
"He who despises most things will be a law-giver among them and he who dares most of all will be most in the right! So it has been till now and so it will always be. A man must be blind not to see it!"
"And yet," Rivière observed... "even though human life may be the most precious thing on earth, we always behave as if there were something of higher value than human life. . . . But what thing?"
"There was something calling to him out there in the open. His mother heard it, too. But she heard also that other and louder call, the call of the fire and of man -- the call which it has been given alone of all animals to the wolf to answer..."
"It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild."
"So that while we are individually and privately dyssynchronous, moving in different ways, for different purposes, in different directions, we may at the same time comprise, however blindly, the pulsing communicating cells of an urban over-brain."
"A story on the page is like a printed circuit for our lives to flow through, A story told invokes our dim capacity to be alive in bodies not our own."
"...I wonder if revelation comes not like light to the eye but as an imposed ordering of that part of the self so deeply interior that it is anonymous."
"Perhaps they knew their babies were born from water. And rhythm was the gentle rock of the water hammock slung between the pelvic trees. And melody was the sound the water made when the baby stirred its limbs."
"His eyelids trembled as if they felt the vast cyclic movement of the earth and her watchers, trembled as if they felt the strange light of some new world."