E. Merrill Brouder

“It is unlikely that reducing history to morality plays makes anyone moral.”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

“I knew that I was 'out.' And that I had now found my way.

To that old master, now, to wizard Faust, old father of the ancient and swarm-haunted mind of man, to that old German land with all the measure of its truth, its glory, beauty, magic and its ruin—to that dark land, to that old ancient earth that I had loved so long—I said farewell.

I have a thing to tell you:

Something has spoken to me in the night, burning the tapers of the waning year; something has spoken in the night; and told me I shall die, I know not where. Losing the earth we know for greater knowing, losing the life we have for greater life, and leaving friends we loved for greater loving, men find a land more kind than home, more large than earth.

Whereon the pillars of this earth are founded, toward which the spirits of the nations draw, toward which the conscience of the world is tending—a wind is rising, and the rivers flow.”
― Thomas Wolfe, I Have a Thing to Tell You

“Whither my heart has gone, there follows my hand, and not elsewhere.
For when the heart goes before, like a lamp, and illumines the pathway,
Many things are made clear, that else lie hidden in darkness.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie

“They had him. They just stood and watched him, each with the faint suggestion of that intolerable slow smile upon his face. They raised their eyes, un-speaking, looked at us as we rolled past, with the obscene communication of their glance and of their smile.

And he—he too paused once from his voluble and feverish discourse as we passed him. He lifted his eyes to us, his pasty face, and he was silent for a moment. And we looked at him for the last time, and he at us-this time, more direct and steadfastly.
And in that glance there was all the silence of man's mortal anguish. And we were all somehow naked and ashamed, and somehow guilty. We all felt somehow that we were saying fare-well, not to a man but to humanity; not to some nameless little cipher out of life, but to the fading image of a brother's face.
We lost him then. The train swept out and gathered speed-and so farewell.”
― Thomas Wolfe, I Have a Thing to Tell You