Brian

“When a child first catches adults out—when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just—his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Mons is a fairy tale. None of you understand time. What does it matter which nations win which wars? Future wars will reverse all gains. God is on no one’s side,”
― Daniel Kraus, Angel Down

“and what if Honest Abe knew what he was talking about when he’d coined the better angels of our natures, what if he meant it literally, that our judgment at the holy gates is based on how we treat angels when chancing upon them, maybe your angel looks like a woman in a red dress, maybe it looks like a puppy, as long as the being is defenseless it serves as a test of benevolence, maybe that’s what’s happening, Cyril Bagger is being fucking tested, drilled in empathy as he was once drilled in warfare,”
― Daniel Kraus, Angel Down

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski