Conor > Conor's Quotes

“In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving. Nature does not often say 'See!' to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply 'Here!' to a body's cry of 'Where?' till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome, outworn game. We may wonder whether at the acme and summit of the human progress these anachronisms will be corrected by a finer intuition, a close interaction of the social machinery than that which now jolts us round and along; but such completeness is not to be prophesied, or even conceived as possible. Enough that in the present case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment; part and counterpart wandered independently about the earth in the stupidest manner for a while, till the late time came. Out of which maladroit delay sprang anxieties, disappointments, shocks, catastrophes -- what was called a strange destiny.”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“We used to have this self-centred idea that Western democracies were the end-point of evolution, and we're dealing from a position of strength, and people are becoming like us. It's not that way. Because if you think this thing we have here isn't fragile you are kidding yourself. This, '- and here Jamison takes a breath and waves his hand around to denote Maida Vale, London, the whole of Western civilization, -'this is fragile.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

“So you were dissidents? You believed in finishing the USSR?''No. It's not like that. You just speak several languages at the same time, all the time. There's like several "you"s.' Seen from this perspective, the great drama of Russia is not the 'transition' between communism and capitalism, between one fervently held set of beliefs and another, but that during the final decades of the USSR no one believed in communism and yet carried on living as if they did, and now they can only create a society of simulations.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

“Tis a Fearful Thing

‘Tis a fearful thing
to love what death can touch.

A fearful thing
to love, to hope, to dream, to be –

to be,
And oh, to lose.

A thing for fools, this,

And a holy thing,

a holy thing
to love.

For your life has lived in me,
your laugh once lifted me,
your word was gift to me.

To remember this brings painful joy.

‘Tis a human thing, love,
a holy thing, to love
what death has touched.”
― Judah Halevi