Ariel’s Reviews > East of Eden > Status Update

"Let me tell you. The proofs that God does not exist are very strong, but in lots of people they are not as strong as the feeling that He does."

"He wondered how his brother felt, wondered whether now that his passion was chilling he would feel panic or sorrow or sick conscience or nothing. These things Adam felt for him.
His conscience bridged him to his brother and did his pain for him the way at other times he had done his homework."

"And Adam was more afraid of the gentleness than he had been at the violence, for it seemed to him that he was being trained as a asacrifice, almost as though he was being subjected to kindness before death."

"For alice had been naked- she had been smiling."

"Sometimes when she was alone, and knew she was alone, she permitted her mind to play in a garden, and she smiled."

"He contributed to the quiet he wished for by offering no violence, no contention, and to do this he had to retire into secretness, since there is some violence is everyone."

"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 judgements are not always wise, their thinking true... his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone.
And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing."