lit quotes

“I can tell you truths. I cannot give you understanding. For how can one give what one does not possess? I have always told the truth.”

Life does not wed death.

"Do you understand what it means to be a saint?”

Cazaril cleared his throat uncomfortably. “You must be very virtuous, I suppose.”

“No, in fact. One need not be good. Or even nice.” Umegat looked wry of a sudden. “Grant you, once one experiences…what one experiences, one’s tastes change. Material ambition seems immaterial. Greed, pride, vanity,

I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?

Cazaril’s mind exploded.

He opened outward, and outward, and outward still, till all the world lay below him as if seen from a high mountain. But not the realm of matter. This was a landscape of soul-stuff; colors he could not name, of a shattering brilliance, bore him up upon a glorious turbulence. He could hear all the minds of the world

Your life is more than just context: it is a record of desires and sensations, and if most are condemned to banality, surely a few must transcend it. Your sensory apparatus is uniquely yours and so is the consciousness attached to it, and your progress through the world cannot entirely be programmed or replicated.

Teidez was tool, not co-conspirator, not a willing fratricide. Unfortunately, he was a tool that had kept on functioning after the workman’s hand had fallen away.

Poems require this daily input of incomplete knowledge, as if you were sewing time into the fabric of your work. The poetic mind has an unusual tolerance for living in this painful gap between the ideal and the botched reproduction. Far from being wimps, poets simply spend more time than the rest of the population in this hazardous landscape.

Then I realized somewhat slowly that all this time she had been petting and comforting me as if it were I who was the child and the victim. And this, even in the midst of the great anguish, made its own little eddy of pain. It was so unlike the sort of love that used to be between us in our happy times.