Phil

“Sister Gee stared at her neighbors as they surrounded her, and at that moment she saw them as she had never seen them before: they were crumbs, thimbles, flecks of sugar powder on a cookie, invisible, sporadic dots on the grid of promise, occasionally appearing on Broadway stages or on baseball teams with slogans like “You gotta believe,” when in fact there was nothing to believe but that one colored in the room is fine, two is twenty, and three means close up shop and everybody go home; all living the New York dream in the Cause Houses, within sight of the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man’s dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugarcane field from the old country. And”
― James McBride, Deacon King Kong

“Boys, she would begin in her motherly way, in your time you shall do wrong unto others and others shall do wrong unto you. And these opposing wrongs will become your chains. The wrongs you have done unto others will be bound to you in the form of guilt, and the wrongs that others have done unto you in the form of indignation. The teachings of Jesus Christ Our Savior are there to free you from both. To free you from your guilt through atonement and from your indignation through forgiveness. Only once you have freed yourself from both of these chains may you begin to live your life with love in your heart and serenity in your step. At”
― Amor Towles, The Lincoln Highway

“The most crucial prerequisite for any couple’s longevity is to have both partners unequivocally accept, as a baseline, that the person they love is insane and has no morals.”
― Paul Rudnick, Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style

“Just from Farrell stalking away I was absorbing so much, including the fact that at any given moment in history, and excluding nurses and brides, there are only at most three people on the planet who can get away with wearing all white, and Farrell was at least two of them.”
― Paul Rudnick, Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style