Robert Hellenga > Quotes

“He doesn't believe in talking too much about art, especially while you're looking at it. The pressure to appreciate is the great enemy of actual enjoyment. Most people don't know what they like because they feel obligated to like so many different things. They feel they're supposed to be overwhelmed, so instead of looking, they spend their time thinking up something to say, something intelligent, or at least clever.”
― Robert Hellenga, The Sixteen Pleasures

“Fussing over food was important. It gave a shape to the day: breakfast, lunch, dinner; beginning, middle, end.”
― Robert Hellenga, Philosophy Made Simple

“All I know is that my life is filled with little pockets of silence. When I put a record on the turntable, for example, there`s a little interval-between the time the needle touches down on the record and the time the music actually starts-during which my heart refuses to beat. All I know is that between the rings of the telephone, between the touch of a button and the sound of the radio coming on, between the dimming of the lights at the cinema and the start of the film, between the lightning and the thunder, between the shout and the echo, between the lifting of a baton and the opening bars of a symphony, between the dropping of a stone and the plunk that comes back from the bottom of a well, between the ringing of the doorbell and the barking of the dogs I sometimes catch myself, involuntarily, listening for the sound of my mother`s voice, still waiting for the tape to begin.”
― Robert Hellenga The Sixteen Pleasures

“It took him half an hour to reach the little mission chapel. From his position on his back in the river he could see just the tip of the steeple, but for the most part he gazed upward at the constellations. Rudy knew his constellations, because each one of his daughters had done a science project on them and they'd spent hours lying on their backs in the middle of the Edgar Lee Masters campus looking up at the sky. As the river bent to the south, he could see Virgo and Centaurus coming into view. At first they reminded him of true beauty, and he was overwhelmed. He knew that this heart-piercing ache, however painful, was the central experience of his life and that he would have to come to terms with it. No one - not Aristotle, not Epicurus, not Siva Singh - would ever convince him otherwise. But then it occurred to him that Virgo and Centaurus were just as arbitrary as the rudimentary classification system he'd used for his books - Helen's books. There were a lot of stars left out of the constellations, and nothing to stop you from drawing the lines in different ways to create different pictures. He wanted to lift his wings and fly, but he didn't have the power. He could only let the river carry him along.”
― Robert Hellenga, Philosophy Made Simple

“People say that God works in mysterious ways when they really mean that life, or something in their own lives, doesn’t make any sense, but I think that’s wrong. I think it means that we can’t make any sense out of life until we give up our deepest hopes, until we stop trying to arrange everything to suit us. But once we do, or are forced to . . . That’s what’s mysterious.”
― Robert Hellenga, The Sixteen Pleasures

“Death was a lens that would reveal things as they really were: what was important would assume its true importance; what was unimportant would recede into the shadows.”
― Robert Hellenga, The Sixteen Pleasures

“The only meaning our lives have is the meaning we give them.”
― Robert Hellenga, Philosophy Made Simple

“There was a time I didn't know your name
Why should I worry, cry in vain
but now she's gone, and I don't worry
cause I'm sittin' on top of the world.”
― Robert Hellenga, Blues Lessons

“Sometimes it takes a little jolt to make us appreciate what we’ve got.”
― Robert Hellenga, Philosophy Made Simple

“However far back you go you will find all experiences linked by slender threads.”
― Robert Hellenga, Philosophy Made Simple

“What to do with the past? There was so much of it.”
― Robert Hellenga, Philosophy Made Simple

“Sometimes pain is God’s megaphone, his only way to get our attention.”
― Robert Hellenga, Philosophy Made Simple

“Nah," I said to myslef, crumpling up the note, "Non vale il pene".”
― Robert Hellenga, The Sixteen Pleasures

“The advice he reads in Ann Landers – good advice as long as you don’t need it, perfectly sensible as long as you don’t have any use for it.”
― Robert Hellenga, Philosophy Made Simple

“You won't know true happiness ... till you give up your heart's desire.”
― Robert Hellenga, The Sixteen Pleasures

“every”
― Robert Hellenga, The Confessions of Frances Godwin

“He wondered what you had to do to lose your driver's license in Italy.”
― Robert Hellenga, The Fall of a Sparrow

“He knew that he’d known her for less than a week, but now that she was gone he was continually probing his feelings for her, the way he might probe a sore tooth with his tongue, engaging her in imaginary conversations, imagining her saying such delightful things.”
― Robert Hellenga, Philosophy Made Simple

“She heard melody and harmony and counterpoint; he heard something calling him from far, far away.”
― Robert Hellenga, Philosophy Made Simple

“I could almost hear my books in the living room, boarded up in their Jefferson bookcases, crying out to me, like someone stuck in an elevator, or a coffin: “Let us out of here. We’re suffocating. Let us out. Let us OUT!” And I started to laugh. “I’ll be down in a minute,” I said.”
― Robert Hellenga, Love, Death & Rare Books