Oh! be thou blest with all that Heaven can send, Long health, long youth, long pleasure-and a friend.
I'll lie here and learn How, over their ground, Trees make a long shadow And a light sound.
The Initial Mystery that attends any journey is: how did the traveler reach his starting point in the first place?
I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!
. . . politics are nothing but sand and gravel: it is art and life that feed us until we die. Everything else is ambition, hysteria or hatred.
Stupidity always accompanies evil. Or evil, stupidity.
Perhaps this very instant is your time.
Your version of the truth is all that matters.
American Morons is the work of an original. Like Hitchcock or Ramsey Campbell, the style is precise, alert, and well-mannered, inviting us to enter Hirshberg's private world so that he may lock the door behind us. If there is anyone in contemporary fiction worth watching, it is Glen Hirshberg.
Nelson Mandela once remarked that he befriended his jailers, those grim, khaki-clad overseers of his decades of hard labor in a limestone quarry, by "exploiting their good qualities. " Asked if he believed all people were kind at their core, he responded, "There is no doubt whatsoever, provided you are able to arouse their inherent goodness. " If that sounds like wishful thinking, well, he actually did it.
Cessation of work is not accompanied by cessation of expenses