A zest for living must include a willingness to die.
I recognise Santangelo's dad, who saves police brutality for when he gets to his son.
It's funny how you can forget everything except people loving you. Maybe that's why humans find it so hard getting over love affairs. It's not the pain they're getting over, it's the love.
What do you think would happen if we kissed right here, right now?" he asks, digging his hands into the pockets of his khaki pants, grinning right back at me. "I think it would cause a riot. " "Well, you know me," he says, lowering his head towards me. "Causing a riot is what I do best. " Santangelo approaches before Griggs gets any closer and pulls him away. "Are you guys insane?" he says, irritated. "It's called peaceful coexistence, Santangelo. You should try it and if it works we may sell the idea to the Israelis and Palestinians," I say, throwing his own words back at him.
My father took one hundred and thirty-two minutes to die.
I didn't realize until those few days how much a hug meant. To have someone hold you could be the greatest medicine of all.
The depression belongs to all of us. I think of the family down the road whose mother was having a baby and they went around the neighborhood saying, "We're pregnant. " I want to go around the neighborhood saying, "We're depressed. " If my mum can't get out of bed in the morning, all of us feel the same. Her silence has become ours, and it's eating us alive.
Hands-on experience at the critical time, not systematic knowledge, is what counts in the making of a naturalist. Better to be an untutored savage for a while, not to know the names or anatomical detail. Better to spend stretches of time just searching and dreaming.
Ralph also took some classes in philosophy and literature and felt himself on the brink of some kind of huge discovery about himself. But it never came.
If we can hump dead animals and antelopes, there's no reason that a man and another man can't elope.
A people fired. . . with love of their country and of liberty, a zeal for the public good, and a noble emulation of glory, will not be disheartened or dispirited by a succession of unfortunate events. But like them, may we learn by defeat the power of becoming invincible.