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'My mother used to say old age was the loosening of the bonds of the flesh that make us cling to false hopes. She said getting old wasn't about the decay of our earthly bodies but about the deliverance of our souls to a place where we could finally see earthly matters clearly and make our peace with them before becoming one with the natural world.'

'Do you consider America your home or Spain?'
'They are both my home, yet somehow neither is my home. I like to think of myself as a flower--a strong, handsome flower--that's been picked and put in a vase while my roots have been left to grow a new flower.'

"The last job he had was being a janitor," I added quietly.
"Then you should be really proud of yourself. And your brother, too. You're both going places. Moving up in the world."
I know what she's implying. I don't say anything because I could never explain how I feel about my dad to someone like Starr.
I might end up being more than him but not better.

Everyone's not a winner, I want to explain to them, and telling people who are losers that they're winners isn't good for anybody. How are kids who suck ever going to get better if people tell them they're good when they're not?

'An artist doesn't create in order to get money, or fame, or acceptance, or love. It's a force inside him, something he must do or his soul will shrivel up and die.'

'Being an artist is not like being a lawyer or a dentist or even a baseball player like your brother,' he tells me. 'You have to earn the right to be called these things. You need society's permission. An artist simply is what he is with or without anyone's approval.'

I've decided that the worst part of loneliness isn't being alone. It's being forgotten.

What is the definition of "living" in the figurative sense? Is it being able to get out of bed in the morning, dress yourself, and go to your job? Is it the ability to laugh at a joke? To appreciate a sunset? To enjoy your time on earth without being consumed by bitterness and apathy? If it's the last one, then every day I see people who are dead and not because they suffered a tragedy.

Shelby's sports car is red, too, but a flashier shade. It's parked in front of the house: small, scarlet, shiny, and rounded like a drop of new blood.

Eventually I figured out that the reason they seemed pleased about being screwups and disappointed in me for doing well was because it was easier to make people who do something better than you feel bad about themselves than it is to admit there's something wrong with you and maybe you should try and fix it.

She loosens her grip on my arm and while I watch her begin to calm down it strikes me that although fear and love can be faked like any other emotion, they are the only two, when genuinely felt, that can't be hidden.

'Conor had already learned that patience was the elixir of revolution. No prose could force a man with a full belly into the streets to rise, nor could any law stop a hungry man from taking to the streets.'

We're born to die, but don't know why, or what it's all about,
Young for a day, then old and gray;
Like the rose that buds and blooms ... and fades and falls away,
Life's a very funny proposition, anyway.

'There is no going back,' he said. 'So we keep our eyes open and go forward.'

Clearly, the antdiluvian premise that fallen angels mated with the offspring of humans is not an unknown doctrine; it has simply been shelved by modern Christianity, for it is an embarrassment to rationalize with the arrogant, secular mindset of our times.

In 1916, as the shadow of the Great War made English-speaking people suspicious of loyalties, a governor of Iowa... William L. Harding decreed that henceforth it would be a crime to speak any foreign language in schools, at church, or ever over the telephone in the great state of Iowa. "There is no use in anyone wasting his time praying in other languages than English ... God is listening only to the English tongue."

At the peak of the Red Scare, 32 of the 48 states had loyalty oaths of one kind or another. In New York ... it was necessary to swear a loyalty oath to gain a fishing permit. The Communist Control Act of 1954 made it a federal offense to communicate any Communist thoughts by any means, including by semaphore. In Connecticut it became illegal to criticize the government, or to speak ill of the American flag.

Altogether between 1946 and 1962, the United States detonated just over a thousand nuclear warheads, including some three hundred in the open air, hurling numberless tons of radioactive dust into the atmosphere. The USSR, China, Britain, and France detonated scores more.

As many as four nuclear detonations a month were conducted in Nevada in the peak years. The mushroom clouds were visible from any parking lot in the city, but most visitors went to the edge of the blast zone itself, often with picnic lunches, to watch the tests and enjoy the fallout afterward. ... Radioactive dust often drifted across Las Vegas, leaving a visible coating on every horizontal surface.

Moms worried about the berries, too, and were forever shouting from the kitchen window not to eat them, which was actually unnecessary because children of the 1950s didn't eat anything that grew wild--in fact, didn't eat anything at all unless it was coated in sugar, endorsed by a celebrity athlete or TV star, and came with a free prize.

Every summer, at the start of the mosquito season, a city employee ... would come to the neighborhood and drive madly all over the place ... with a fogging machine that pumped out dense, colorful clouds of insecticide through which at least eleven thousand children scampered joyously for most of the day. ... For years afterward whenever I coughed into a white handkerchief I brought up a little ring of colored powder.

I can't imagine there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than America in the 1950s. No country had ever known such prosperity. When the war ended the United States had $26 billion worth of factories that hadn't existed before the war, $140 billion in savings and war bonds just waiting to be spent, no bomb damage, and practically no competition.

Scorpions as a species will likely survive nuclear war. Arachnida with book lungs have been around for hundreds of millions of years. Scorpions came before the dinosaurs, they lived through the dinosaurs' extinction, and will likely outlive humans. After nuclear World War III, the scorpions' hard shells will protect them from the radiation that will kill off most of the humans who manage to initially survive ...

The consequences of a nuclear conflict between Russia and NATO are cataclysmic. A 2020 computer simulation by nuclear weapons scholars with Princeton University's Program on Science and Global Security found that a nuclear exchange between Russia and NATO would almost certainly escalate quickly, leading to the death and injury of nearly 100 million people in the first few hours.

For me, the presence of God is in the very struggle to understand Him, the struggle to come to terms with His existence. I have felt Him most strongly at the moment when I doubted Him most. Doubt is the thing that calls Him to me. It is on the point of untroubled belief that I lose Him.

... how can you have a morally good state founded on injustice?

Still, is it in the nature of love to seek freedom or bondage?

And yet, he had lost his soul.
It wasn't that Henry had led him to the realization. He had not been persuaded. Rather, he heard the words and knew they were true. The minute he heard them, he felt not only the desolation in their meaning but also the exaltation. The words held him like a mirror. They called out for that which he had never been able to accomplish: surrender.

How he had struggled against the very idea of soul, or at least against the idea that lay behind it: God, the great intruder. You could not have one without the other, no soul without God, and he had always felt disdain for the idea of God, for the idea of divine presence, for the idea of a merciful watchman.