Sublime

“The three stages of life: youth, middle age, and ‘You’re looking good, Mr. Keating.’”

So seen, stupidity could be defined as a failure to make enough connections, and insanity as severe repeated error in making connections – in telling The Story of My Life.

And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.

“IT IS AS IF WE ALL CARRY in our makeup the effects of accidents that have befallen our ancestors,” writes V. S. Naipaul, “as if we are in many ways programmed before we are born, our lives half outlined for us.”

A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime.” He paused for a long moment; then

“You know, insanity runs in my family,” I tell him, quoting from one of my favorite films, the classic Arsenic and Old Lace.

“We require at all times a certain quantity of care or sorrow or want, as a ship requires ballast, to keep on a straight course.”

You kill yourself, she exclaimed, “with nothing at all to show for it . . . that corresponds to the effort you put out. In that situation, you really feel you are a slave, humiliated to the very depths of your being.”

there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say, ‘This is he,’ or, ‘This is she.’