Lose an hour in the morning and you search for it all day.
Love is thing of heart. Or love is like this sake: night of joy, yes, but in cold morning, headache, sick stomach. A man should love concubine, so when love dies he say, “Goodbye,” easy and no injury. Marriage is different: marriage is matter of head… rank… business… bloodline.
“Twould bend company rules on private trade, aye, but the trees what survive cruel winds are those what do bend, eh, are they not?”
“A tidy metaphor does not make a wrong thing right.”
Tain’t good intentions what paves the road to hell: it’s self-justifyin’s.
Two hours pass at the speed of one but exhaust Jacob like four
but bibliophiles made wise by reading are rare there as anywhere.
He leavens his lie with some truth.
and like a struck tuning fork, Jacob reverberates with the parts and the entirety of Orito, with all the her-ness of her.
Creation never ceased on the sixth evening. Creation unfolds around us, despite us, and through us, at the speed of days and nights, and we like to call it “love.”
His companion dismissed the balloon as a bauble, a frivolity, and demanded of Franklin, “Yes, but what use is it?”
“What use is a newborn child?”
I shall stop taking drugs from tomorrow.
My “tomorrow” is proof that I must stop today.
Self-pity is a noose dangling from a rafter.
The belly craves food, the tongue craves water, the heart craves love, and the mind craves stories.
The human mind as a loom that weaves disparate threads of belief, memory, and narrative into an entity whose common name is Self, and which sometimes calls itself Perception.
To implant belief is to dominate the believers.
Whatever a man is busy with, that is what, or whom, he values.
A story must move. And misfortune is motion. Contentment is inertia.
The cold a darkness are from a time before people and fire.
De Zoet’s mind works an abacus of implications.
By making you bored, I made you boring.
A threat you aren’t willing to carry through is no threat at all.
To have relied on a man to stay alive is a bond closer than blood.
By trying not to remember the creeds of the order, he remembers them.
One pays an army for a thousand days to use it for one.
When I asked how, he called me a very ignorant fellow. This means he does not know.
The readiest apologies carry the littlest worth.
But thought has no eyelids to close or ears to block.
Van Cleef laughs like a pirate watching a rival mauled by sharks.
face speaks of fatherlessness and resilience.
Naming, even in ridicule, gives what is named substance.
Hatred eats haters like ogres eat boys.
To win, purify yourself of the desire to win.
When pain is vivid, when decisions are keen-edged, we believe that we are the surgeons. But time passes, and one sees the whole more clearly.
Jacob envies youth its clarities and certainties.