Eric Hinkle > Recent Status Updates

"If we're better than any other human society, then we ought to be helping them."

"Sometimes [Stephanie, our youngest] seems not to recognize us in public. She feels about kindergarten the way people used to feel about going away to college: at least she is out of the house, out of her parents' control, on her own in the great world. I think she has an irrational faith that she won't always be two years younger than Lizzie."

"Once more they gave up trying to talk reasonably; once more they sighed simultaneous but unsympathetic sighs; once more each resolved to stare only at the unrolling highway."

"'Tell my why, WHY do the Christians hate us the way they do? They seem so nice when I can look at them without my star.'

'... The Christians say they love [Jesus, a Jew]. But I think they hate him without knowing it. So they take the cross by the other end and make a sword out of it and strike us with it!'"

"He got up to look for something to drink. Sometimes there were a few drops left at the bottom of yesterday's bottle, sometimes not. It was too early to go to the shop. It was too early to be alive, so he just walked from wall to wall, dying."

"As with all disasters, the only thing that can make one forget a massacre is an even bigger massacre, and we're a people whose fate it is to be forgotten as a result of its accumulated calamities."

"There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair."

"I had a sort of invisible reek of sadness and low self-esteem that kept people far away, like a sulfuric stink cloud that I emitted into the air around me."

"The ways to be unwanted were inexhaustible, it seemed, and as a child I still had no clue how to claim a spot for myself in the world."

"I was a drip of paint dropped onto a foundation on the shady side between two worlds, where the sun barely touches. I was drying slowly."

"If I may so express it, I was steeped in Dora. I was not merely over head and ears in love with her, but I was saturated through and through. Enough love might have been wrung out of me, metaphorically speaking, to drown anybody in; and yet there would have remained enough within me, and all over me, to pervade my entire existence."

"Flora Johansson spoke of her love affairs with disarming naiveté. It was as if she were telling anecdotes about devoted pets, all of whom were deserving of equal, fair and simultaneous attention. There was a matter-of-fact amorality about her, the way a marsh cradles a waterlily but leaves it unsullied."

"I love you as much as an old man would love his past to be only a dream from which he is awaking."

"When life becomes cheaper than death, then holding on to it by our very teeth becomes more difficult than giving it up." 🇵🇸

"He slept that night in the fisherman's hut in a whale-gut hammock, and got up at dawn smelling like a dried herring, and went down to the cove under Cutnorth Cliff where his new boat lay."

"They would never know how lucky they had been. For a lifetime, mankind had achieved as much happiness as any race can ever know. It had been the Golden Age. But gold was also the color of sunset, of autumn: and only Karellen's ears could catch the first wailings of the winter storms."

"Ah-h-h, you've a mind filled with interesting things. So many things I'd never imagined."
The same applies to Herbert himself.

"Missionaria Protectiva: the arm of the Bene Gesserit order charged with sowing infectious superstitions on primitive worlds, thus opening those regions to exploitation by the Bene Gesserit." OUCH.

"Orlando, whom hunger had made desperate, drew his sword, intending to take their meat by force, and said: 'Forbear and eat no more; I must have your food!' The Duke asked him if distress had made him so bold, or if he were a rude despiser of good manners?'"

"Trading negroes from Africa is so horrid! It is not to be thought of! But trading them from Kentucky -- that's quite another thing!"

"Mr Wilson's mind was one of those that may not inaptly be represented by a bale of cotton -- downy, soft, benevolently fuzzy, and confused."

"If any of our refined and Christian readers object to the society into which this scene introduces them, let us beg them to conquer their prejudices in time. The slave catching business is rising to the dignity of a lawful and patriotic profession. [...] if human property retains the locomotive tendencies of the 19th century, the trader and catcher may yet be among our aristocracy."

"It's a free country, sir; the man's MINE, and I do what I please with him--that's it!"
-some brainless redneck in chapter 2

"What if, the girl says. Instead of saying, this border divides these places. We said, this border unites these places. This border holds together these two really interesting different places. What if we declared border crossings places where, listen when you crossed them, you yourself became doubly possible."

"...the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7 month old baby with its arms blown off.' This sharp phone call impelled Begin's government to halt its rain of fire almost immediately, but Israel refused to budge on the crucial issue of international protection for the Palestinian civilian population. [...] Israel made no distinction between militants and civilians."

"The assault [in 1982] was so unrelenting that even Ronald Reagan was moved to demand that Begin [the Israeli PM] halt the carnage. Reagan's diary relates that he called Begin during the ferocious offensive, adding, 'I was angry--I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately & said..." [Cont]

"I have learned more from those who have fallen down than those who have remained upright."

"The friendly rose-patterned plates in the rack, the ladle on the wall, the blue-checked curtains, the woman's knitting on the windowsill, the warmth from the cooking stove, the cat, the aroma of coffee, the moonlight, the sea--it was perhaps not many krónurs' worth if you tried to sell it, but all the same it was the world at its fairest and best."

"Every time he inhaled, his lungs rattled like greasy paper bags."