A Quote by Peter S. Beagle
Men have to have heroes, but no man can ever be as big as the need, and so a legend grows around a grain of truth, like a pearl.
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...like a grain of sand that gets into an oyster's shell. What if the grain doesn't want to become a pearl? Is it ever asked to climb out quietly and take up its old position as a bit of ocean floor?
History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man.
At the heart of every legend there is a grain of truth.
The truth about the life of a man is not what he does, but the legend which he creates around himself.
A man with a grain of faith in God never loses hope, because he ever believes in the ultimate triumph of Truth.
Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that showeth best by day; but it will not rise to the price of a diamond or carbuncle, that showeth best in varied lights. A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure. Doth any man doubt that, if there were taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?
Like the newspapers used to say, if the truth isn't big enough, you print the legend.
Talent, and genius as well, is like a grain of pearl sand shifting about in the creative mind. A valued tormentor.
In wrestling, if there is a legend, Roddy Piper is a legend, no doubt about it. Nobody was ever like he was.
Heroes do not dwell in a time of peace; heroes are hardened in a kiln against the sorrows. Their troubles sharpen the blade and make it gleaming. The glint becomes a brightness that is raised high on a hill, allowing women and men to see beyond themselves. For light swallows darkness. Truth buries death. Heroes are not born. They are filled by Music.
From a grain of sand in the Pearl comes.
A man is not merely a man but a man among men, in a world of men. Being good at being a man has more to do with a man’s ability to succeed with men and within groups of men than it does with a man’s relationship to any woman or any group of women. When someone tells a man to be a man, they are telling him to be more like other men, more like the majority of men, and ideally more like the men who other men hold in high regard.
What wounded veteran's don't need is sympathy. THey need to be treated like the men they are: equals, heroes, and people who still have tremendous value for society.
True, I used to see a lot of hope. I saw men tear down the veils behind which the truth had been hidden. But then the same men, when they have power in their hands at last, began to find the veils useful. They made many more. Life has not changed. Only some people have been growing, becoming different, that is all. After a youth spent fighting the white man, why should not the president discover as he grows older that his real desire has been to be like the white governor himself, to live above all the blackness in the big old slave castle?
Generations of men are like the leaves. In winter, winds blow them down to earth, but then, when spring season comes again, the budding wood grows more. And so with men: one generation grows, another dies away.
War is like a monster," he says, almost to himself. "War is the devil. It starts and it consumes and it grows and grows and grows." He's looking at me now. "And otherwise normal men become monsters, too.
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