Gemütlichkeit

Jan 21

“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.” Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (via bookmania)

Sep 5

“We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.” Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Page 415

Sep 4

“In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.” Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Page 415

Sep 3

“‘Thou mayest rule over sin,’ Lee. That’s it. I do not believe all men are destroyed. I can name you a dozen who were not, and they are the ones the world lives by. It is true of the spirit as it is true of battles - only the winners are remembered. Surely most men are destroyed, but there are others who like pillars of fire guide frightened men through the darkness. ‘Thou mayest, Thou mayest!’ What glory! It is true that we are weak and sick and quarrelsome, but if that is all we ever were, we would, millenniums ago, have disappeared from the face of the earth…But the choice, Lee, the choice of winning!” Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Samuel, page 309

Sep 2

“There’s more beauty in the truth even if it is a dreadful beauty.” Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Lee’s father, page 360

Sep 1

“And I feel that I am a man. And I feel that a man is a very important thing - maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed - because ‘Thou mayest.’” Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Lee, page 304

Aug 31

“But ‘Thou mayest’! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.” Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Lee, page 303

Aug 30

“Samuel may have thought and played and philosophized about death, but he did not really believe in it. His world did not have death as a member. He, and all around him, was immortal. When real death came it was an outrage, a denial of the immortality he deeply felt, and the one crack in his wall caused the whole structure to crash. I think he had always thought he could argue himself out of death. It was a personal opponent and one he could lick.” Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Page 292

Aug 29

“No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us.” Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Lee, page 268

Aug 28

“The ways of sin are curious,” Samuel observed. “I guess if a man had to shuck off everything he had, inside and out, he’d manage to hide a few little sins somewhere for his own discomfort. They’re the last thing we’ll give up.” “Maybe that’s a good thing to keep us humble. The fear of God in us.” (Adam) “I guess so,” said Samuel. “And I guess humility must be a good thing, since it’s a rare man who has not a piece of it, but when you look at humbleness it’s hard to see where its value rests unless you grant that it is a pleasurable pain and very precious. Suffering - I wonder has it been properly looked at.” Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Page 268

Aug 27

“At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions: What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?…And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual…If the glory can be killed, we are lost.” Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Page 132

Aug 26

“Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes…Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.” Steinbeck’s East of Eden.

Aug 25

“When a child first catches adults out - when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just - his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.” Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Pages 19-20

Aug 24

“When June came the grasses headed out and turned brown, and the hills turned a brown which was not brown but a gold and saffron and red - an indescribable color.” Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Page 5.

Aug 23

“Every petal of blue lupin is edged with white, so that a field of lupins is more blue than you can imagine. And mixed with these were splashes of California poppies. These too are of a burning color - not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of the poppies.”

Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Page 4

Love of California.

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