He had four names at various times. A person’s life is heterogeneous, so this could be seen as an advantage. Life’s parts sometimes have little in common, so little that it might appear various people lived them. When this happens, it is difficult not to feel surprised that all these people carry the same name.
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Walter M. Miller Jr. on Bombs, Bitterness, and Half-Remembered Eden
Bombs and tantrums, when the world grew bitter because the world fell somehow short of half-remembered Eden. The bitterness was essentially against God. Listen, Man, you have to give up the bitterness — "be granting shriv'ness to God," as she'd say– before anything; before love. But bombs and tantrums. They didn't forgive.
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Lewis on Two Types of Understanding
Human intellect is incurably abstract. Pure mathematics is the type of successful thought. Yet the only realities we experience are concrete – this pain, this pleasure, this dog, this man. While we are loving the man, bearing the pain, enjoying the pleasure, we are not intellectually apprehending Pleasure, Pain or Personality. When we begin to do so, on the other hand, the concrete realities sink to the level of mere instances or examples: we are no longer dealing with them, but with that which they exemplify. This is our dilemma – either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste – or, more strictly, to…
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David Foster Wallace on Entertainment
Who would say entertainment is bad? I mean, I wouldn't say entertainment is bad. But a model of life in which I have a right to be entertained all the time seems to me not to be a promising one. Right?
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Galsworthy on the Wish to Love the World
Only one thing really troubled him, sitting there — the melancholy craving in his heart — because the sun was like enchantment on his face and on the clouds and on the golden birch leaves, and the wind's rustle was so gentle, and the yew-tree green so dark, and the sickle of a moon pale in the sky. He might wish and wish and never get it — the beauty and the loving the world!