Great Throughts Treasury

"The blackness would stir and eventually go away, and God would remain, a shining point of light in my heart. I would go on loving."

"That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?"

"The fact I choose doubt as a philosophy of life is like choosing immobility as a means of transport."

"The cruelty of children comes as news to no one."

"The clear liquid in our eyes is seawater and therefore there are fish in our eyes, seawater being the natural medium of fish. Since blue and green are the colors of the richest seawater, blue and green eyes are the fishiest. Dark eyes are somewhat less fecund and albino eyes are nearly fishless, sadly so. But the quantity of fish in an eye means nothing. A single tigerfish can be as beautiful, as powerful, as an entire school of seafaring tuna. That science has never observed ocular fish does nothing to refute my theory; on the contrary, it emphasizes the key hypothesis, which is: love is the food of eye fish and only love will bring them out. So to look closely into someone's eyes with cold, empirical interest is like the rude tap-tap of a finder on an aquarium, which only makes the fish flee. In a similar vein, when I took to looking at myself closely in mirrors during the turmoil of adolescence, the fact that I saw nothing in my eyes, not even the smallest guppy or tadpole, said something about my unhappiness and lack of faith in myself at the time... I no longer believe in eye fish in [i]fact[/i], but still do in metaphor. In the passion of an embrace, when breath, the win, is at its loudest and skin at its saltiest, I still nearly think that I could stop things and hear, feel, the rolling of the sea. I am still nearly convinced that, when my love and I kiss, we will be blessed with the sight of angelfish and sea-horses rising to the surface of our eyes, these fish being the surest proof of our love. In spite of everything, I sill profoundly believe that love is something oceanic."

"The first is the sense of wonder that goes deeper."

"The boundaries are not to be blurred. I was sent off, struck by his harshest thunderbolt, excommunication. In his eyes I am no longer a man of the cloth. But yet I feel the Lord's hand Holding Me Up."

"The first step to survival is an open eye for what is at hand and what must be done next. Who waits in idle hope of help, of wasting his life with reverie."

"The grand march of progress apparently includes the unfortunate necessity of chopping down every obstacle in its way."

"The Greater Good and the Greater Profit are not compatible aims."

"The holy word is story, and story is the holy word."

"The indifference of the many, combined with the active hatred of the few, has sealed the fate of animals."

"The individual soul touches upon the world soul like a well reaches for the water table. That which sustains the universe beyond thought and language, and that which is at the core of us and struggles for expression, is the same thing. The finite within the infinite, the infinite within the finite."

"The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar. It was natural that, bereft and desperate as I was, in the throes of unremitting suffering. I should turn to God"

"The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart. Meanwhile, the lot of widows and homeless children is very hard, and it is to their defense, not God's, that the self-righteous should rush."

"The long-term optimism may be the product of only one thing: reason. Any unreasonable optimism tends to be defeated by reality and even to lead to greater unhappiness. Optimism must therefore be grounded in reason, unshakably rooted in it, so that pessimism becomes a silly attitude, myopic. Being the reasonableness that thing inglorious and warm it is, this means that that optimism can arise only from small, almost ridiculous, and yet undeniable achievements."

"The men nodded vigorously at me. When they took hold of me and lifted me in their strong arms, I thought nothing of it. I thought they were helping me. I was so full of trust in them that I felt grateful as they carried me in the air. Only when they threw me overboard did I begin to have doubts."

"The mongoose looked away. They did it like one man, all of them turning in the same direction at exactly the same time. I pulled myself out to see what it was. It was Richard Parker. He confirmed what I had suspected, that these mongoose had gone for so many generations without predators that any notion of flight distance, of flight, of plain fear, had been genetically weeded out of them. He was moving through them, blazing a trail of murder and mayhem, devouring one mongoose after another, blood dripping from his mouth, and they, cheek to jowl with a tiger, were jumping up and down on the spot, as if crying, My turn! My turn! My turn!"

"The matter is difficult to put into words. For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you."

"The moon was a sharply defined crescent and the sky was perfectly clear. The stars shone with such fierce, contained brilliance that it seemed absurd to call the night dark."

"The moon distresses you by silently reminding you of your solitude; you open your eyes wide to escape your loneliness."

"The most beautiful rooms I have entered have been empty ones. Warehouses full of light and dust. Empty attics with a view. Coastlines. Prairies."

"The most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man."

"The obsession settling in the center of everything is the bane of both theologians and zoologists."

"The precept that location is key to the success of a business applies to art, and even to life itself: we thrive or wither depending on how nourishing our environment is."

"The obsession with putting ourselves at the centre of everything is the bane not only of theologians but also of zoologists."

"The paths to liberation are numerous, but the bank along the way is always the same, the Bank of Karma, where the liberation account of each of us is credited or debited depending on our actions."

"The reason death sticks do closely to life isn't biological necessity-its envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only an thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud."

"The reward for the watching eye and listening ear is great."

"The reward for the watching eye and the listening ear is great. I spent more hours than I can count a quiet witness to the highly mannered, manifold expressions of life that grace our planet. It is something so bright, loud, weird and delicate as to stupefy the senses."

"The presence of God is the finest of rewards."

"The sad fact is there are no natural deaths, despite what doctors say. Every death is felt by someone as a murder, the unjust taking of a loved being. And even the luckiest of us will encounter at least one murder in our own lives: our own. It is our fate. We all live a murder mystery of which we are the victim."

"the senile, lecherous expression of a camel."

"The truth of life is that Brahman is no different from atman, the spiritual force within us, what you might call the soul."

"The world is not so simple as it is. So, we realize it, is not it? And that something you realize something is to do, is not it? I do not make that story from the life ?"

"The three-toed sloth lives a peaceful, vegetarian life in perfect harmony with its environment. A good-natured smile is forever on its lips...I have seen that smile with my own eyes. I am not one given to projecting human traits and emotions onto animals, but many a time during that month in Brazil, looking up at a sloth in repose, I felt I was in the presence of upside-down yogis deep in meditation or hermits deep in prayer, wise beings whose intense imaginative lives were beyond the reach of scientific probing."

"The sky was black and spitting rain on my face Smiling."

"The sound would disappear, but the hurt would linger, like the smell of piss long after it has evaporated."

"The sun was beginning to pull the curtains on the day."

"The tennis challenger starts strong but soon loses confidence in his playing. The champion racks up the games. But in the final set, when the challenger has nothing left to lose, he becomes relaxed again, insouciant, daring. Suddenly he's playing like the devil and the champion must work hard to get those last points."

"The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other. The sea is without a wrinkle. There is not a whisper of wind. The hours last forever. You are so bored you sink into a state of apathy close to a coma. Then the sea becomes rough and your emotions are whipped into a frenzy. Yet even these two opposites do not remain distinct. In your boredom there are elements of terror: you break down into tears; you are filled with dread; you scream; you deliberately hurt yourself And in the grip of terror?the worst storm?you yet feel boredom, a deep weariness with it all."

"Then fear turns to your body, which already feels that something terrible and evil spirits is to occur. Already your breath flew like a bird and your guts escaped by crawling like a snake. Now you have the language that collapses like an opossum, while your jaw begins to gallop on site. Your ears hear not. Your muscles begin to tremble as if you had malaria and your knees to quiver as if you were dancing. Your heart pump madly, while your sphincter relaxes. This is true of the rest of your body. Every part of you, in its way, loses its means. Only your eyes work well. They always lend full attention to fear. You quickly take rash decisions. You give up your last allies: hope and trust. Here you have defeated yourself. Fear, which is only an impression, has triumphed over you. This experience is difficult to express. For fear, real fear, one that shakes you to the core of you, that you feel when you are facing your final destiny, snuggled insidiously into your memory like a gangrene: it seeks at all rot, even the words to talk about her. So you have to fight very hard to call it by its name. You must relate hard to shine the light of words on it. Because if you do not, if fear becomes an unspeakable darkness that you avoid, you manage perhaps to forget, you expose yourself to further attacks of fear because you never really fought against the enemy that defeated you."

"Then normal sank."

"Then Richard Parker, companion of my torment, awful, fierce thing that kept me alive, moved forward and disappeared forever from my life."

"There are no grounds for going beyond a scientific explanation of reality and no sound reason for believing anything but our sense experience. A clear intellect, close attention to detail and a little scientific knowledge will expose religion as superstitious bosh. God does not exist. -- Why tolerate darkness? Everything is here and clear, if only we look carefully."

"Then, what is the point of having a reasonable, Richard Parker? Is just to meet daily needs - looking for food, clothing, and a roof for shelter? Why reason cannot give answers that are more complex? Why can we ask for things no answer? Why has the mesh so great that very few fish to catch?"

"There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God... These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside."

"There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless."

"There are many examples of animals coming to surprising living arrangements...where an animal takes a human being or another animal to be one of its kind."

"There are animals we haven't stopped by. Don't think they're harmless. Life will defend itself no matter how small it is."