Mythology is the discourse we need in extremity. We have to be prepared for a myth to change us forever. Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth (2005) Image: Edmund Dulac, from The Marriage of Cupid and Psyche
There was something unbearable in the things, in the people, in the buildings, in the streets that, only if you reinvented it all, as in a game, became acceptable. The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it. Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant […]
It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humor. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843) Image: “Merry Old Santa” by Thomas Nast (Public Domain Review)
He did not think of these books as something invented to beguile the idle hour, but as living creatures, caught in the very behaviour of living, — surprised behind their misleading severity of form and phrase. He was eavesdropping upon the past, being let into the great world that had plunged and glittered and sumptuously […]
“But there’s nothing in this world that I’m not ready to see and learn, and no god that I’m not ready to approach in his own fashion. I told you that truth was the shadow of God. If I am to use it, I must know who He is. Do you understand me?” “How could […]
You can’t pray for my trouble. Infatuation, it’s called. Being in love. Christianity is supposed to be all about love but it’s utterly useless when you’re in love. There’s not a blind thing you can do about being in love it seems to me except sit it out. Jesus said love one another. He said […]
The only vessel in which the soul could be studied was the living human body, which made it as difficult as trying to study the soul of a Mexican jumping bean. We could learn nothing about the soul from a corpse, I had decided, after several firsthand encounters with cadavers. Flavia de Luce, in The […]