Cody Coyle > Recent Status Updates

Thine, ever thine

His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her grave-clothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.

Perhaps they had taken refuge in number and noise from the secret dread in their souls. But he, apart from them and in silence, remembered in what dread he stood of the mystery of his own body.

The commadment of love bade us not to love our neighbors as ourselves with the same amount and intensity of love but to love him as ourselves with the same kind of love.

A restless feeling of guilt would always be present: he would confess and repent and be absolved, fruitlessly. Perhaps that first hasty confession wrung from him by fear of hell had not been good? Perhaps, concerned only for his imminent doom, he had not sincere sorrow for his sin? But the surest sign that his confession had been good and that he had sincere sorrow for his sin was, he knew, the amendment of his life.

Do you ever self-insert into a novel so hard that if it doesn’t end up going well for the main character it’s going to make you feel hopeless?

Truth come not out from your horrid den. Hide deeper, fearful Truth. For you flaunt in the brutal gaze of the sun things that were better unknown and undone, you unveil the shameful; the dark you make clear, Hide! Hide! Hide!

Nothing I did or said among the other boys came to me naturally. As a result, in every encounter, even the most glancing, I had to be a performer, for at all times I was aware I was impersonating a human being.

I didn’t want him to like men, just me, not even as a man but me as a discarnate ardor, pure willingness in his naïve, manly, exquisitely untested arms.

I’d decided to take the very futility I so often felt, the vacant hum, the sense of subsisting outside whatever was vibrant and to equate precisely this secular emptiness with the sacred void, to make of my shame a jewel, to call my poverty wealth.

It seemed to me then that beauty is the highest good, the one thing we all want to be or have or, failing that, destroy and that all the world’s virtues are nothing but the world’s spleen and deceit.

For I could thrive in the expressive, inhuman realm of nature or the expressive, human realm of books—both worlds so exalted, so guileless—but I felt imperiled by the hidden designs other people were drawing around me.

I carried the plots and atmosphere of fiction about with me and tried to cram random events into those ready molds. But no, truthfully, the relationship was more reciprocal, less rigorous—life sang art’s songs, but art also took the noise life gave and picked it out as a tune (the cocktail pianist obliging the humming drunk)

The wrong words on his lips, the wrong desires in his heart, and his arms full of air.

He was an average man, and could have won an average fight, but Nature had pitted him against the extraordinary, which only saints can subdue unaided, and he began to lose ground.

It’s happening I’m finally letting myself read this

I don’t know how to explain it but this book keeps making me think about Dead Souls

I really love when one of the gods just plucks their favorite guy from the battlefield cuz he’s about to die. That’s really sweet

I want to die right here and now, because I could not save my slaughtered friend. He died so very far from home. He needed me to help him and protect him. And I did not go back to my dear country, nor did I save Patroclus.