Marvin

“Fred Astaire. Not a handsome man. He said himself he couldn’t sing. He was balding his whole life. He danced like a cheetah runs, with the grace of the first creation. I mean, that first week. On one of those days God created Fred Astaire. Saturday maybe, since that was the day for the pictures. When you saw Fred you felt better about everything. He was a cure. He was bottled in the films and all around the earth, from Castlebar to Cairo, he healed the halt and the blind. That’s the gospel truth. St Fred. Fred the Redeemer.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“The next time you feel yourself giving in to the sometimes overwhelming urge to panic about the fate of literature in the digital age, follow this simple remedy: remember that you dream. For that is ironclad proof . . . that literature—that narrative art in whatever form—will never die. Humans, strange creatures that we are, make sense of our lives by telling stories. In the space between each day and the next, we refresh our minds by concocting the most fantastic and elaborate fictions. We spend roughly a third of our lives thus, re-arranging our scattered experiences into stories. That we do it at all is bizarre and inexplicable. But as long as we do it, we will crave stories—human stories, stories that speak to us—in our waking life. The Internet, powerful as it is, cannot change that.”
― Adam Hammond

“A Lutheran church in Nebraska is typically a place where any mad passion for Christ is politely concealed. Men and women recite the various creeds in hypnotic monotone; the hymns, pumped from wheezy organ pipes, are sung with no lilt or musicality. The members of the choirs not only don't dance, they don't sway. That's not to say no one is ever smacked hard with God's love or filled up to the eyeballs with the Holy Spirit, but when you are, you keep it to yourself." (48)”
― Timothy Schaffert, The Coffins of Little Hope

“Things repeat themselves: people, life, death. But here God is the cameraman's boss, Thomas Alva Edison, he who has done the old biblical Lord one better: made sound that outlasts the life of the voice, light that knows no darkness, and now has made people who do not die, whose images shall remain forever on the earth in celluloid. And, from that which he has created, the light and the phonograph and the moving pictures and so much else, he has made what any true God must make here in America. Money. Piles of the stuff" (343-44).”
― Jonathan Lowy