If it weren’t for music, I would think that love is mortal.
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.
The beauty of truth is that it need not be proclaimed or believed. It skips from soul to soul, changing form each time it touches, but it is what it is, I have seen it, and someday you will, too.
I read. The more you read, the more the world opens up to you… and the happier you are and more comforted you feel. It’s up to you. No you is educated who cannot educate himself.
The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and remake one’s soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule.
When faced with something I fear, I tend to eat spaghetti.
Small scenes can be so beautiful that they change a man forever.
Physical features count little unless they are illumined from within.
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.
Read what you find interesting, and then follow your interests. You’ll find that in doing so you always generate enough to illuminate the next step.
Nobody steals books except kleptomaniacs and university students. In most places you can leave a book on the street and come back for in the next day.
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.
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.
No matter what it is, if you don’t move your eyes and set the pace yourself, your intellect is sentenced to death. The mind, you see, is like a muscle. For it to remain agile and strong, it must work. Television rules that out.
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.
their powerlessness, innocence, and imagination fused to enable them to turn time inside out, travel on the wind, and enter the souls of animals.
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.
There is justice in the world, Peter Lake, but it cannot be had without mystery.
For the first time in his life, he felt exactly what he was, and he was not impressed.
She felt as if she knew the stars, and had been among them, or would be.
…what argument is left with someone you love if she is willing to break your heart?
Justice came from a fight amid complexities, and required all the virtues in the world merely to be perceived.
We are like poor people, who have nothing but each other, and are happy.
In America, Fredericka, they don’t really have trains for people. The trains here are used mainly to transport pigs, television sets, and fruit.
I was brought up,’ Freddy informed him, ‘not to suffer anxiety about decisive initiative of all types.
If your faith is genuine, then you meet your responsibilities, fulfill your obligations, and wait until you are found. It will come. If not to you, then to your children, and if not to them, then to their children.
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.
Those who are vain have little ability to feel grateful.
Well-timed silence is the most commanding expression.