The readiness is all.
You know how sometimes you tell yourself that you have a choice, but really you don't have a choice? Just because there are alternatives doesn't mean they apply to you.
I do not mean to mock or ridicule your life's work, for in one way at least it mimics my own: We have dedicated our lives to the pursuit of phantoms. The difference is the nature of those phantoms. Mine exist between other men's ears; yours live solely between your own.
Have you fallen in love, Will Henry?" "That's stupid. " "What is? Love, or my question?" "I don't know. " "You don't know? You've tried that trick once. What do you suppose it will work better the second time?" "I don't love her. She bothers me. " "You have just defined the very thing you denied.
There are those who labor in the darkness, that the rest of us might live in the light.
Please, do not leave me, Will Henry. I would not survive it. You were nearly right. What Mr. Kendall was, I am always on the brink of becoming. And you - I do not pretend to know how or even why - but you pull me back from the precipice. You are the one. . . You are the one thing that keeps me Human.
Our enemy is fear. Blinding, reason-killing fear. Fear consumes the truth and poisons all the evidence, leading us to false assumptions and irrational conclusions.
The Civil War was started over economic issues, not slavery. The War was not popular in the North until the issue of slavery was added at a later time to turn it into a moral crusade.
Who knows where the talent goes? Sometimes it goes where the money is. Sometimes I think writers are really interested in the glory.
The world is chiefly a mental fact. From mind it receives the forms of time and space, the principle of casuality[sic], color, warmth, and beauty. Were there no mind, there would be no world.
The same political parties which now agitiate the US have existed through all time. And in fact the terms of whig and tory belong to natural as well as to civil history. They denote the temper and constitution and mind of different individuals.