The memorable story of the ends to which one may go to save others from suffering, without trust in God, at all costs - and how that road leads to totThe memorable story of the ends to which one may go to save others from suffering, without trust in God, at all costs - and how that road leads to total despair and destruction.
The last 50 or so pages are some of Greene’s best writing.
“Why, he wondered… do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn’t had time to disguise itself? Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst.”
“Oh God, he thought, I’ve killed you: you’ve served me all these years and I’ve killed you at the end of them. God lay there under the petrol drums and Scobie felt the tears in his mouth, salt in the cracks of his lips. You saved me and I did this to you. You were faithful to me, and I wouldn’t trust you.”
“Though the voice was no longer speaking from the cave of his belly, it was as though fingers touched him, signaled their mute messages of distress, tried to hold him…”
“For goodness’ sake, Mrs. Scobie, dont imagine you - or I - know a thing about God’s mercy…. I know what the Church says. The Church knows all the rules. But it doesn’t know what goes on in a single human heart.”...more
“We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who’ll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, w“We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who’ll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we’ll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.”...more
Greene writes that this is a novel more of hate than of love, but perhaps it is most a novel of fear - fear of the Divine and what He demands of us.
“Greene writes that this is a novel more of hate than of love, but perhaps it is most a novel of fear - fear of the Divine and what He demands of us.
“I wish I knew a prayer that wasn’t me, me, me. Help me. Let me be happier. Let me die soon. Me, me, me. Let me think of those awful spots on Richard’s cheek. Let me see Henry’s face with the tears falling. Let me forget me. Dear God, I’ve tried to love and I have made such a hash of it. If I could love you, I know how to love them. I believe the legend. I believe you were born. I believe you died for us. I believe you are God. Teach me to love. I don’t mind my pain. It’s their pain I can’t stand. Let my pain go on and on, but stop theirs. Dear God, if only you could come down from your cross for a while and let me get up there instead. If I could suffer like you, I could heal like you.”...more
There is nothing else like this beautiful 260 page oddity. A mock self-help book, Percy perceptively tells the story of modern man’s alienation from tThere is nothing else like this beautiful 260 page oddity. A mock self-help book, Percy perceptively tells the story of modern man’s alienation from the very world he inhabits. Mixing philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, and theology, this book is at once hilarious and biting. There are three core questions in this book: Why do humans feel alienated and lost in a time of unprecedented wealth and technological progress? How do people try to repair that feeling? Do we need help?
The course to the answering of those questions is rather circuitous, but always in an extremely enjoyable fashion. You are along for the ride with a buoyant Kierkegaard. While a few moments did feel like they could have been condensed, largely it was a wonderful and thought provoking romp. The final ~50 pages are hard to forget. —— “There is a special sense in which for the past two or three hundred years the self has perceived itself as a leftover which cannot be accounted for by its own objective view of the world and that in spite of an ever heightened self-consciousness, increased leisure, ever more access to cultural and recreational facilities, ever more instruction on self-help, self-growth, self-enrichment, the self feels ever more imprisoned in itself - no, worse than imprisoned because a prisoner at least knows he is imprisoned and sets store by freedom awaiting him... a state of affairs which has to be called something besides imprisonment - e.g., boredom. Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself. “
“The earth-self seeks to understand the Cosmos overtly according to scientific principles while covertly exempting itself from the same understanding. The end of this enterprise is that the self understands the mechanism of the Cosmos but by the same motion places itself outside the Cosmos, an alien, a ghost, outside a vast machinery to which it is denied entry.... As time goes on and our science and technology advance and our knowledge of the Cosmos expands, the gap between our knowledge of the Cosmos and our knowledge of ourselves widens and we become ever more alien to the very Cosmos we understand, and our predicament ever more extreme...”
“If you’re a big enough fool to climb a tree and like a cat refuse to come down, then someone who loves you has to make as big a fool of himself to rescue you.” ...more
“Don’t commit the one sin for which there is no forgiveness… The sin against grace. If God gives you the grace to believe in him and love him and you “Don’t commit the one sin for which there is no forgiveness… The sin against grace. If God gives you the grace to believe in him and love him and you refuse, the sin will not be forgiven you.”
“Dear God, I can see it now, why can’t I see it other times, that it is you I love in the beauty of the world and in all the lovely girls and dear good friends, and it is pilgrims we are, wayfarers on a journey, and not pigs, nor angels.”...more
“If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we’d live like animals or a“If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we’d live like animals or angels in the happy land that needs no heroes. But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all… why then perhaps we must stand fast a little - even at the risk of being heroes.”
“Finally… it isn’t a matter of reason; finally it’s a matter of love.”...more
“That was the difference, he had always known, between his faith and theirs, the political leaders of the people who cared only for things like the st“That was the difference, he had always known, between his faith and theirs, the political leaders of the people who cared only for things like the state, the republic: this child was more important than a whole continent.”
“It was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization - it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.”
“It’s not good your working for your end unless you’re a good man yourself. And there won’t always be good men in your party. Then you’ll have all the old starvation, beating, get-rich-anyhow. But it doesn’t matter so much my being a coward - and all the rest. I can put God into a man’s mouth just the same - and I can give him God’s pardon. It wouldn’t make any difference to that if every priest in the Church was like me.”...more
I can’t remember the last time I had this much fun reading a book. The plot has just about everything you could want in a novel (mystery, coming of agI can’t remember the last time I had this much fun reading a book. The plot has just about everything you could want in a novel (mystery, coming of age, romance, historical settings, murder, war, social and political drama) and the scenes are dripping with beautiful images. Not to mention Zafon’s language. As I read any book, I keep a list of quotes in my notes app. The only book that can rival the number of citations from this is perhaps “Les Misérables,” which is twice the length.
This book is eminently fun because of its fast paced plot but it features many deeper threads that really pack a punch. Notably powerful are the threads about war and memory, social upheaval and resistance to it, how children deal with the sins of their parents, fate, the evils of humanity, and the rapidly dying art of reading. It is fast paced, totally engrossing, and I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t enjoy it. Read this book!
Some of my favorite quotes: “I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages... while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.”
“Television, my dear Daniel, is the Antichrist, and I can assure you that after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own and humans will return to living in caves, to medieval savagery, and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of a bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.”
“[People are] not evil. Moronic, which isn’t quite the same thing. Evil presupposes a moral decision, intention, and some forethought. A moron or a lout, however, doesn’t stop to think or reason. He acts on instinct, like a stable animal, convinced he’s doing good, that he’s always right, and sanctimoniously proud to go around f*cking up, if you’ll excuse the French, anyone he perceives to be different from himself... what the world needs is more thoroughly evil people and fewer borderline pigheads.”
“When everyone is determined to present someone as a monster, there are two possibilities: either he’s a saint or they themselves are not telling the whole story.”
“[She] says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it’s an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scare by the day”...more
This book conveys expertly, as the publisher’s note says, “man’s struggle to maintain faith in a world committed to destroying it.” The blackness of RThis book conveys expertly, as the publisher’s note says, “man’s struggle to maintain faith in a world committed to destroying it.” The blackness of Rodrigues’ isolation can overwhelm the reader at times, but Endō manages to not let us stay in that darkness too long, offering bits and pieces of hope (even if only in Rodrigues’ mind). This book is a true tour de force.
I expected this book to be a powerful look into the Jesuit and Japanese martyrs and missionaries of the 17th century (which it is), but what took me by surprise was how Endō made Christ so acutely personal. For this latter reason, this book is uniquely worth reading....more
In a word, this novel is tempered, it reads like a bullet. Surrealist revelations, environments painted in purple and red-gold, and inner voices that In a word, this novel is tempered, it reads like a bullet. Surrealist revelations, environments painted in purple and red-gold, and inner voices that the reader can’t be sure are the character’s or a demon’s. Especially powerful coming from a Catholic point of view, about how we can’t out run God....more
“How beautiful and horrible life is… too horrible to simply call tragic.”
“I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician. My intent“How beautiful and horrible life is… too horrible to simply call tragic.”
“I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician. My intent wasn’t to save the world as to heal myself. Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously, in entering the profession, we must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. But it can also deepen the wound.”...more
Huxley’s masterpiece remains both relevant and prophetic because, unlike Orwell’s response to it, Nineteen-Eighty-Four, which took aim at a political Huxley’s masterpiece remains both relevant and prophetic because, unlike Orwell’s response to it, Nineteen-Eighty-Four, which took aim at a political ideology, Brave New World looks deeply into the heart of each individual and examines how one’s basic instincts may be manipulated into joyfully embracing their own enslavement. This book shows how the most dangerous philosophies are not those of the “boot-on-the-face”, like Fascism or Communism, which would never be sustainable for long, but rather those that play into our basest human desires; offer us unlimited pleasure (entertainment, sex, drugs) and take away our suffering, then mankind in its shortsightedness will happily hand over the keys to our minds, bodies, and souls. This “dictatorship without tears” (as Huxley said) is the most dangerous and potentially everlasting, as well as the most degrading to human dignity. ~~~~~ “Even after decanting, he’s still inside a bottle - an invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations. Each one of us, of course, goes though life inside a bottle.”
“Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can’t. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered.”
“Even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy... that’s another cost of stability. It isn’t only art that’s incompatible with happiness; it’s also science. Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled... all our science is just a cookery book, with an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody’s allowed to question.”
“The gods are just. Haven’t they used his pleasant vices as an instrument to degrade him?”
“I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then, I ate my own wickedness.”...more
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