Jessica’s Reviews > The Razor’s Edge > Status Update

It is eternal because its completeness and perfection are unrelated to time. It is truth and freedom.

Reality. You can’t say what it is; you can only say what it isn’t. It’s inexpressible. The Indians call it Brahman. It’s nowhere and everywhere. All things imply and depend upon it. It’s not a person, it’s not a thing, it’s not a cause. It has no qualities. It transcends permanence and change; whole and part, finite and infinite.

It is uncreated; it has existed from eternity and when at last it has cast off the seven veils of ignorance will return to the infinitude from which it came. It is like a drop of water that has arisen from the sea and in a shower has fallen into a puddle, then drifts into a brook, finds it way into a stream, after that into a river, passing through... till at last it reaches the boundless sea from which it rose.

Liberation from the bondage of rebirth. According to the Vedantists the self, which they call the atman and we call the soul, is distinct from the body and its senses, distinct from the mind and its intelligence; it is not part of the Absolute, for the Absolute, being infinite, can have no parts, but the Absolute itself.

She was not a bad sort, generous and hospitable, and her only grave fault was her malicious tongue. She could not help saying beastly things about even her intimate friends, but she did this because she was a stupid woman and knew no other way to make herself interesting.

I only wanted to suggest to you that self-sacrifice is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling. It whirls its victim to destruction in the highest affirmation of his personality. The object doesn’t matter; it may be worthwhile or it may be worthless. No wine is so intoxicating, no love so shattering, no vice so compelling.

She’d lived in heaven and when she lost it she couldn’t put up with the common earth of common men, but in despair plunged headlong into hell.

Because American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.

But I have a notion that they are saying very much the same sort of things as we said forty years ago, only they speak of Picasso instead of Manet and of André Breton instead of Guillaume Apollinaire. My heart goes out to them.

…and I foresee the day when the crowned heads of Europe will seek the hands of our dollar princesses. What was it Shelley said? ‘The world’s great age begins anew, the golden years return.’