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The shock, the power of an ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a dust-free room.
As belief shrinks from the world, it is more necessary than ever that someone believe. Wild-eyed men in caves. Nuns in black. Monks who do not speak. We are left to believe. Fools, children. Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes.
I think if you maintain a force in the world that comes into people's sleep, you are exercising a meaningful power.
That's the thing about baseball ... You do what they did before you. That's the connection you make. There's a whole long line. A man takes his kid to a game and thirty years later this is what they talk about when the poor old mutt's wasting away in the hospital.
History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood--read the speeches of Mussolini--at least we've known the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation.
Some people fake their death, I'm faking my life.
Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday.
You gave yourself away, word by word, every time you opened your trap to speak.
The family was an art ... and the dinner table was the place it found expression.
There is a balance, a kind of standoff between the time continuum and the human entity, our frail bundle of soma and psyche. We eventually succumb to time, it's true, but time depends on us. We carry it in our muscles and genes, pass it on to the next set of time-factoring creatures, our brown-eyed daughters and jug-eared sons, or how would the world keep going. Never mind the time theorists, the cesium devices that measure the life and death of the smallest silvery trillionth of a second.... We were the only crucial clocks, our minds and bodies, way stations for the distribution of time.
When you see a thing like that, a thing that becomes a newsreel, you begin to feel you are a carrier of some solemn scrap of history.
It's not enough to hate your enemy. You have to understand how the two of you bring each other to deep completion.
Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and Remission.
You feel sorry for yourself. You think you're missing something and you don't know what it is. You're lonely inside your life. You have a job and a family and a fully executed will, already, at your age, because the whole point is to die prepared, die legal, with all the papers signed. Die liquid, so they can convert to cash.
I'm not saying sex is our divinity. Please. Only that sex is the one secret we have that approximates an exalted state and that we share, two people share wordlessly more or less and equally more or less, and this makes it powerful and mysterious and worth sheltering.... Sex is what you can get. For some people, most people, it's the most important thing they can get without being born rich or smart or stealing. This is what life can give you that's equal to others or better, even, that you don't have to go to college six years to get. And it's not religion and it's not science but you can explore it and learn things about yourself.
Pain is just another form of information.
Longing on a large scale is what makes history.
Fame and secrecy are the high and low ends of the same fascination.
Famous people don't want to be told that you have a quality in common with them. It makes them think there's something crawling in their clothes.
It is interesting ... how weapons reflect the soul of the maker.
It's a curious rite of passage, isn't it? Visit the old places. First you wonder how you lived so uncomplainingly in such cramped circumstances. The streets are narrower, the buildings smaller than you ever remembered. It's like coming back to Lilliput.
You shout because it makes you brave or you want to announce your recklessness.
Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that's electronic and sex that's cyberspaced, untouched money and computer-safe sex, the convergence of consumer desire--not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices.
I think silence is the condition you accept as the judgment on your crimes.
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