“Running out the anchor line, the pirates babbled to one another, and in the tangle of their barbaric language, Aspasia listened for one word—Athens. It lit up the darkness in her mind, like the single glint her eyes fixed on above the distant gray-green hills.”
― Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece
― Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece
“You love each other until you can't live without each other. And even if you stop loving each other for a little while, you can't...you can't live without each other.”
― Anxious People
― Anxious People
“This saying is as old as Western philosophy itself, giving expression to that fundamental experience and orientation of ancient man from which philosophy begins; ἀ-λήθεια, unhiddenness, into which philosophy seeks to bring the hidden, is nothing arbitrary, and is especially not a property of a proposition or sentence, nor is it a so-called ‘value’. It is rather that reality, that occurrence [Geschehen], into which only that path (ἡ ὁδóϛ) leads of which another of the oldest philosophers likewise says: ‘it runs outside the ordinary path of men’, ἀπ´ ἀνθρώπων ἐκτὸϛ πάτου ἐστίυ (Parmenides, Fr. 1, 27).”
― The Essence of Truth: On Plato's Cave Allegory and Theaetetus
― The Essence of Truth: On Plato's Cave Allegory and Theaetetus
“This is life, new and strange; strange, because we fear it; new, because we have kept our eyes turned from it. This is life lived in cramped limits and expressing itself not in terms of our good and bad, but in terms of its own fulfilment. Men are men and life is life, and we must deal with them as they are; and if we want to change them, we must deal with them in the form in which they exist and have their being.”
― Native Son
― Native Son
“Some days are better than others, for human optimism has no limits.”
― The Arbitrator
― The Arbitrator
Rodger’s 2025 Year in Books
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