There is secrecy and betrayal but that’s more part and parcel of the kind of anguish that the people go through. And maybe that’s modes of survival, rather than modes of consciousness.
I want the flashbacks to feel that once you’re there they have their own unity, their own kind of atmospheric sensibility; I want the reader to be transported. The novel is a big, complicated, unknowable thing before it’s written.
I think that’s great – I just try not to be one of those people. I find the more I think about it, the less free I feel when I write and when I work.
The past, as you suggest, is absolutely present at all times and the present is born from the past. I wouldn’t want to suggest that the past determines the present.
For sometimes you can’t help but crave some ruin in what you love.
A tale, like the universe, they tell us, expands ceaselessly each time you examine it, until there’s finally no telling exactly where it begins, or ends, or where it places you now.
Imagination might not be limitless. It’s still tethered to the universe of what we know.
For no matter the shadows of an age, the picture of a young couple in love, we are told, speaks most luminously of the future, as the span of that passion makes us believe we can overleap any walls, obliterate whatever obstacles.
It is ‘where we are’ that should make all the difference, whether we believe we belong there or not.
To be honest, Im not that much of a reader of Korean fiction, since so little is translated.
If I sit next to a madman as he drives a car into a group of innocent bystanders, I can’t, as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe, then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver.
Your life as a Christian should make nonbelievers question their disbelief in God.
The person who’s in love with their vision of community will destroy community. But the person who loves the people around them will create community everywhere they go.
Being a Christan is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God’s will.
The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.
We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.
May God in His mercy lead us through these times; but above all, may He lead us to Himself.
Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.
The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists of listening to them. Just as love of God begins with listening to his word, so the beginning of love for our brothers and sisters is learning to listen to them.
The biggest mistake you can make in your life is to be always afraid of making a mistake.
Don’t own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.
Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.
Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.
It may be that when we no longer know which way to go that we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.
Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.
I don’t believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.
You crave winning and fear losing instead of just doing. To succeed you must remove your self-imposed limitations.
Helping people and putting smiles on their faces is a great, great thing. God only knows why more people don’t do it more often.
People who repeatedly attack your confidence and self-esteem are quite aware of your potential, even if you are not.
Sometimes people with low self-esteem will try to punish you for caring about them.
Instead of loving people and using money, people often love money and use people.
The sad truth about bigotry is that most bigots either don’t realize that they are bigots, or they convince themselves that their bigotry is perfectly justified.
Growth of consciousness does not depend on the might of the intellect but on the conviction of the heart.
Change. Adapt. Bend so as not to be broken. Let opportunity guide your actions.
You must learn to control your dreams or your dreams will forever control you.
I’ve been told, by various people, that I think too much. This is incorrect! The truth is that I deliberately challenge people to think more than they would like to.
The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.
Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.
The world is what it is men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
Non-fiction can distort facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.
It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling.
His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.
After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.
Like many isolated people, they were wrapped up in themselves and not too interested in the world outside.
It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over.
You get what you give. What you put into things is what you get out of them.
Doubt is a killer. You just have to know who you are and what you stand for.
Beauty is only skin deep. I think what’s really important is finding a balance of mind, body and spirit.
I only do what my gut tells me to. I think it’s smart to listen to other people’s advice, but at the end of the day, you’re the only one who can tell you what’s right for you.
It’s a shame to call somebody a ‘diva’ simply because they work harder than everybody else.
When I am wrong, I will learn the lesson and move on to face other challenges. For me, that’s what creating your own life is. Doing your best work while being your best self.
When I was young, I was just about hard work. But as I got older, I did experience anxiety, doubt, judgment, and it’s so easy to lose yourself for a second.
I know that being seen as a role model means taking responsibility for all my actions. I am human, and of course, sometimes I make mistakes. But I promise that when I fall, I get back up.
If anyone can figure out how to balance my celebrity and my dual careers in music and film, it’s me. I don’t feel frightened; I feel challenged.
I came from the Bronx and a certain background. I worked really hard. I kept my focus on the right things.
There is one act par excellence which profanes money by going directly against the law of money, an act for which money is not made. That act is giving.
Almost always, it is the conviction that ‘I am right’ or ‘my cause is the cause of justice’ that triggers violence. That is, …the moment propaganda does its work, violence is unleashed. And violence can be reduced by countering this propaganda.
Christians should be troublemakers, creators of uncertainty, agents of a dimension incompatible with society.
Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve.
Prayer is not a discourse. It is a form of life, the life with God. That is why it is not confined to the moment of verbal statement.
The fact of knowing how to read is nothing, the whole point is knowing what to read.
Education no longer has a humanist end or any value in itself; it has only one goal, to create technicians.
The goal of modern propaganda is no longer to transform opinion but to arouse an active and mythical belief.
No one knows where we are going, the aim of life has been forgotten, the end has been left behind. Man has set out at tremendous speed- to go nowhere.
Belief is reassuring. People who live in the world of belief feel safe. On the contrary, faith is forever placing us on the razor’s edge.
The secret of a happy life is respect. Respect for yourself and respect for others.
I have no interest in problematizing things. So what I am writing to is that simple sense of being human in myself.
I don’t know what it’s like to be Jewish, but I suspect there is some aspect of that: being Jewish is the thing that bonds you as opposed to being Jewish from Poland, or Jewish from Hungary.
If you want to really deeply touch the viewer or the reader, the theater might be the most powerful way to do it.
Here’s the problem: we are living in a time when the act of reading is changing. The nature of a reader’s attention is changing. The capacity for deep literary engagement is changing.
I see the American experience as being defined by the immigrant paradigm of rupture and renewal: rupture with the old world, the old ways, and renewal of the self in a bright but difficult New World.
Sooner or later we’ve all got to confront the reality that we have got to come to understand who we are and what we’re doing, and the extent to which we are guided or manipulated by forces that are beyond our control.
I think that literary forms are losing their capacity to connect people to issues, to the experiences that feel most meaningful to them.
I don’t have an ideal reader. I’m trying to reach something simple and, I believe, universal, in every single person.
I can’t be a spokesman for anything other than my own concerns. I have to be free to wrestle with my own preoccupations, and if I’m bringing any political awareness to that process, that mitigates my freedom.
