In America, Fredericka, they don’t really have trains for people. The trains here are used mainly to transport pigs, television sets, and fruit.

When faced with something I fear, I tend to eat spaghetti.

The ones who are always on your side, or so they think, are the ones who keep you down. Everything they do keeps you down. They’ll forgive you for anything. Rob, rape, pillage, and kill, and they’ll defend you to yourself. They understand all outrages, and all your failings and faults, too. Perfect! You can...

You can’t expect anyone to trust revelation if he hasn’t experienced it himself. Those who haven’t only know reason. And since revelation is a thing apart, and cannot be accounted for reasonably, they never will believe you. This is the great division of the world and always has been. When reason and revelation run together,...

They had taken to the movement unlike anything he had ever seen, and he thought that should this venture of the Jews prove successful, the new state would be filled with dancers and musicians, but especially dancers, for dancing like nothing else says: I am still alive.

Young Bindo Altovini, looking out from time, made a perfect coalition with the mountains, the sky, and the tall redheaded woman who had bent over just slightly to examine a raging battle that was long over. Alessandro imagined that Bindo Altovini was saying, half with longing, half with delight, “These are the things in which...

The streets of New York and some wards of its venerable institutions were packed with people who, despite being entirely forsaken, had episodes of glory that made the career of Alexander the Great seem like a day in the life of a file clerk.

Why do people resist [engines, bridges, and cities] so? They are symbols and products of the imagination, which is the force that ensures justice and historical momentum in an imperfect world, because without imagination we would not have the wherewithal to challenge certainty, and we could never rise above ourselves.

Rigel, Betelgeuse, and Orion. There was no finer church, no finer choir, than the stars speaking in silence to the many consumptives silently condemned, a legion upon the dark rooftops. The wind came down from the north like a runner in lacrosse, violent and hard, to batter every living thing. They were there, each one...

I don’t want these. They’re mud and they’ve got no color. Or at least the color is different from what I’m used to. Take any American city, in autumn, or in winter, when the light makes the colors dance and flow, and look at it from a distant hill or from a boat in the...

Quite possibly there’s nothing as fine as a big freight train starting across country in early summer, Hardesty thought. That’s when you learn that the tragedy of plants is that they have roots.

I work with a great deal of discipline, although I usually take on more than I can handle and often have to extend due dates. I have always been appalled by bohemianism because of its laziness, disorder, and moral weakness. I understand that this way of living is a response to the fact of human...

[When] he’s here, he’s always reading. He says books stop time. I myself think he’s crazy…Don’t tell anyone, but when he reads something that he likes he gets real happy, turns on the music, and dances by himself, or with a broom sometimes.

There is justice in the world, Peter Lake, but it cannot be had without mystery.

For example, they recently had a piece on a character–I think his name was Ambrosio D’Urbervilles–whose “design statement” was to stuff an entire apartment from floor to ceiling with dark purple cottonballs. He called it “Portrait of a Dead Camel Dancing on the Roof of a Steambath.

He felt as if he were paying for the privilege of music with portions of his life and body. But it was well worth it.

Mr. de Pinto, the dog who protects sheep quickly learns how to direct them, and it becomes a habit. The people have been trained by their ‘watchmen’ to jump, and to trample what the ‘watchmen’ want trampled.”I have found, that those who would guard the people are their governors. The government admits that it is...

Music was a chain forged half of silences and half of sound, love was nothing without longing and loss, and were time not to have at its end the absence of time, and the absence of time not to have been preceded by time, neither would be of any consequence.

Then the bow orchestra began to play an apocalyptically beautiful canon, one of those pieces in which, surely, the composer simply transcribed what was given, and trembled in awe of the hand that was guiding him.

She felt as if she knew the stars, and had been among them, or would be.

If it weren’t for music, I would think that love is mortal.

No one ever said that you would live to see the repercussions of everything you do, or that you have guarantees, or that you are not obliged to wander in the dark, or that everything will be proved to you and neatly verified like something in science. Nothing is: at least nothing that is worthwhile....

I think it takes some terrible or great event to fuse two people together without inhibition. Without heat or shock, it can’t be done. I believe that’s why sexual love, which needn’t be, is so intensely intertwined with sin.

…what argument is left with someone you love if she is willing to break your heart?

As long as you have life and breath, believe. Believe for those who cannot. Believe even if you have stopped believing. Believe for the sake of the dead, for love, to keep your heart beating, believe. Never give up, never despair, let no mystery confound you into the conclusion that mystery cannot be yours.

Lonely people have enthusiasms which cannot always be explained. When something strikes them as funny, the intensity and length of their laughter mirrors the depth of their loneliness, and they are capable of laughing like hyenas. When something touches their emotions, it runs through them like Paul Revere, awakening feelings that gather into great armies.

A good river is nature’s life work in song.

Justice can sleep for years and awaken when it is least expected. A miracle is nothing more than dormant justice from another time arriving to compensate those it has cruelly abandoned. Whoever knows this is willing to suffer, for he knows that nothing is in vain.

He moved like a dancer, which is not surprising; a horse is a beautiful animal, but it is perhaps most remarkable because it moves as if it always hears music.

To be mad is to feel with excruciating intensity the sadness and joy of a time which has not arrived or has already been. And to protect their delicate vision of that other time, madmen will justify their condition with touching loyalty, and surround it with a thousand distractive schemes. These schemes, in turn, drive...

At least until there are new lakes in the clouds that open upon living cities as yet unknown, and perhaps forever, that is a question which you must answer within your own heart.

I see no justice in that plan.””Who said,” lashed out Isaac Penn, “that you, a man, can always perceive justice? Who said that justice is what you imagine? Can you be sure that you know it when you see it, that you will live long enough to recognize the decisive thunder of its occurrence, that...

But you won’t abdicate.”Of course not. It’s my duty to go on, to maintain the line. I can’t possibly fail in that. It’s as if you and I were throwing a ball back and forth to establish a record, and had been doing so for a millennium. You cannot drop a ball that has remained...

Winter then in its early and clear stages, was a purifying engine that ran unhindered over city and country, alerting the stars to sparkle violently and shower their silver light into the arms of bare upreaching trees. It was a mad and beautiful thing that scoured raw the souls of animals and man, driving them...

their powerlessness, innocence, and imagination fused to enable them to turn time inside out, travel on the wind, and enter the souls of animals.

Justice came from a fight amid complexities, and required all the virtues in the world merely to be perceived.

Reason excludes faith,” Alessandro responded, watching the blood-red mite as it made a dash for the rim. “It’s deliberately limited. It won’t function with the materials of religion. You can come close to proving the existence of God by reason, but you can’t do it absolutely. That’s because you can’t do anything absolutely by reason....

Then, just at the peak of complacency, when it was assumed that the climate of the world had changed forever, when the conductor of the philharmonic played Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and left out an entire movement, and when to children of a young age stories of winter were told as if they were fairy tales,...

I saw how greatly he suffered the requirement of being clever. It separated him from his soul, and it didn’t get him anything other than a living.