Pascale

“It's the traditional religions which have removed the mystery by claiming to explain the inexplicable. Who made us? God. What happens when we die? We go somewhere else. How can we do that? Because of a part of us, called the soul, which is invisible, is also immortal. Only when a frown of doubt crossed the Christian forehead did the ancient fathers of the church begin to talk about the mystery. Having removed the mystery, they pretended to put it back ahead. What they called the mystery was the bits left over, the ragged edges of doubt, where the traditional explanations left the hearer dissatisfied. God works in mysterious ways, they said. But that was the mystery which God had been invented to remove. (...)
It's a trap to say you have to be either theist, atheist, or agnostic, because each of these positions lends a certain respectability to the word God. The theist believes in God. The agnostic isn't sure. The atheist doesn't believe in God. But which God? Each of these positions implies the meaning of the word God is intelligible - even though the believers may be murdering one another over how God should be properly described and worshipped.”
― C K Stead, Death of the Body

“A correspondence is a kind of love affair... tinged by a subtle but palpable eroticism. (...) It is with our own epistolary persona that we fall in love, rather than with that of our pen pal.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer

“Commercial Councillor van der Straaten (...) lived in superstitious dread of an annihilating blow to his happiness, but expected it neither today nor tomorrow; and the more certain and inevitable it seemed in the distant future, the safer and the more carefree he felt in the present.”
― Theodor Fontane, Two Novellas: The Woman Taken in Adultery; The Poggenpuhl Family

“Mrs. Bennet was fertilizing her roses. (...) She did think that, probably more than most people, they had souls. If she had been asked what she meant by a soul she would have dismissed the question as though soul were as much an ingredient of life as salt or cinnamon or baking powder.(...) The smell of her oses when she buried her nose in them was soul.”
― Penelope Mortimer, The Home