I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me.
What are you? (Danger) Well, had you listened before you stabbed me, you would have heard the ‘I’m Acheron’s Squire’ part. Apparently that somehow escaped your hearing and you mistook me for a pin cushion. (Alexion)
I prayed hard and only gradually became aware that this fierce praying was a way of finding prologue and entrance into my own writing. This came as both astonishment and relief. When I thought God had abandoned me, I discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world.
Nothing you become will disappoint me; I have no preconception that I'd like to see you be or do. I have no desire to forsee you, only to discover you. You can't disappoint me.
I cried today. I wasn't sad. You showed me beauty that I had only seen in books and dreams. I now see it in you.
For me the Koenigsberg longshoremen had beauty; the Polish jimkes on their grain ships had beauty; the broad freedom of movement in the gestures of the common people had beauty. Middle-class people held no appeal for me at all.
I thank every bully I ever had because that's the only reason I'm here. I learned how to not be affected by it and triumph over it, and that made me - again, if I had any success whatsoever, it's because these people made fun of me.
There is one statesman of the present day, of whom I always say that he would have escaped making the blunders that he has made if he had only ridden more in buses.
I had an upbringing in which I was allowed to be free and use my mind. My parents only helped me to be myself. It was only in my teenage years that I met people who made me start having doubts about who I was. They said you shouldn't be confident, you shouldn't be strong. It is only when you meet those other people that you lose confidence.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
The thing that most haunted me that day, however...was the fact that these things had - apparently - actually occurred...For all his attention to my historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history's terrible moments were real. I understand now, decades later, that he could never have told me. Only history itself can convince you of such a truth. And once you've seen that truth - really seen it - you can't look away.
I try my best to be honest. A lot of the greats before me did the same and what you come to find out is that, when you have the opportunity to share your words with millions of people, you're not the only one who had that experience. That's the beauty in it.
Darkness coiled between what he wanted them to believe and the self he despised. It only made him more alone. How could you save someone when he didn't let you kno him? What a waste. The beauty he murdered in this place. He could never see what he had, only what he failed to achieve.
What I was being told in my 20s in the close-quartered, male-ego-infused work space, was that I had to stop reacting with my emotions to sexual desire towards me. The change, in other words, had to be made in me.
I hit adolescence only to discover my autobiography had already been written; plagiarized, in fact, by a man named J.D. Salinger who, in appropriating to himself my inner mass of pain and confusion, had given me the unlikely name of Holden Caulfield.
If only I had discipline, but alas, it is only an obsessive-compulsive trait and the beauty of habit that causes me to return again and again to my work.
My mother had faith in me, had more faith in me than I had in myself, and knowing that she did made me try to find faith. She believed in trying things.