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41 " No one could imagine how a man could survive one winter alone and exposed in the woods, never mind decades of them. Howard, instead of trying to explain the hermit's existence in terms of hearth fires and trappers' shacks, preferred the blank space the old man actually seemed to inhabit; he liked to think of some fold in the woods, some seam that only the hermit could sense and slip into, where the frozen forest itself would accept him and he would no longer need fire or wool blankets, but instead flourish wreathed in snow, spun in frost, with limbs like cold wood and blood like frigid sap. "
― Paul Harding , Tinkers
42 " Don’t write your books for people who won’t like them. Give yourself wholly to the kind of book you want to write and don’t try to please readers who like something different. Otherwise, you’ll end up with the worst of both worlds. I write lyrical, introspective, experiential books concerned with consciousness and perception. If a reader wants to know what my protagonist’s insurance policies are, he’ll be better off curling up with a nice cup of chamomile tea and an actuarial table. Similarly, don’t write your books for bad readers. Your books will suffer from bad readers no matter what, so write them for brilliant, big-brained and big-hearted people who will love you for feeding their minds with feasts of beauty. "
― Paul Harding
43 " Howard, instead of trying to explain the hermit's existence in terms of hearth fires and trappers' shacks, preferred the blank space the old man actually seemed to inhabit; he liked to think of some fold in the woods, some seam that only the hermit could sense and slip into, where the ice and snow, where the frozen forest itself, would accept him and he would no longer need fire or wool blankets, but instead flourish wreathed in snow, spun in frost, with limbs like cold wood and blood like frigid sap. "
44 " اطمئن، لأن الألم الذى يعتصر قلبك والحيرة التى تتملكك يعنيان أنك لا تزال على قيد الحياة، ولا تزال بشريا، ولا تزال مفتوحا على جمال العالم، بالرغم من أنك لم تفعل شيئا لتستحقه. وعندما تستاء من الألم الذى فى قلبك، تذكر: ستموت وتدفن قريبا. "
45 " إن قدر الإنسان ألا يكون مرتاحاً فى عالمه. "
46 " On the seventh day, Howard turned off the trail and sat by the river and smoked a pipeful of tobacco that he had packed for the hermit. As he smoked, he listened to the voices in the rapids. They murmured about a place somewhere deep in the woods where a set of bones lay on a bed of moss, above which a troop of mournful flies had kept vigil the previous autumn until the frosts came, and they, too, had succumbed. "
47 " Howard thought, Is it not true: A move of the head, a step to the left or right, and we change from wise, decent, loyal people to conceited fools? Light changes, our eyes blink and see the world from the slightest difference of perspective and our place in it has changed infinitely. "
48 " Houses can be ghosts, too, just like people. "
49 " Thought that he was a clock was like a clock was like a spring in a clock when it breaks and explodes when he had his fits. But he was not like a clock or at least was only like a clock to me. But to himself? Who knows? And so it is not he who was like a clock but me. "
50 " Perhaps, Howard thought, the curtains and murals and pastel angels are a mercy, a dim reflection of things fit for the fragility of human beings. Whenever he looked at the angels in the family Bible, though, he saw their radiant golden halos and resplendant white robes and he shook with fear. "
51 " My father would say, The forgotten songs we never really knew, only think we remember knowing, when what we really do is understand at the same time how we have never really know them at all and how glorious they must really be. "
52 " My mind blazed with ravishing lies. I thought, I cannot accept this gift of myself, myself as a gift, of my person, of having this mind that does not stop burning, that deceives itself and consumes itself and immolates itself and believes its own lies and chokes on plain fact. "
― Paul Harding , Enon
53 " And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough. "
54 " The flowers Howard now walked among were the few last heirs to that brief local span of disaster and regeneration and he felt close to the sort of secrets he often caught himself wondering about, the revelations of which he only ever realized he had been in the proximity of after he became conscious of that proximity, and that phenomenon , of becoming conscious, was the very thing that whisked him away, so that any bit of insight or afterglow that remained but that was not accessible through words. He thought, But what about through grass and flowers and light and shadow? "
55 " ...he was openly weeping and lamenting the loss of this world of light and hope. "
56 " I had a deep and abiding love for the idea that this life is not something that we are forced to endure but rather something in which we are blessed to be allowed to participate. But I felt no gratitude whatsoever for, and no relief from, the pain I experienced every waking moment, and this life felt like nothing more than a distillation of sorrow and anger. "
57 " The joy of those years had its own integrity, and Kate existed within that. She could not be touched by the misery caused by her own death. "
58 " But a huge part of being a writer is discovering your own intellectual and aesthetic autonomy, and how you best get the best words onto the page. "
59 " The dust in the air was made up of the book I found. I breathed the book before I saw it, tasted the book before I read it. "
60 " Everything is made to perish; the wonder of anything at all is that it has not already done so. No, he thought. The wonder of anything is that it was made in the first place. What persists beyond this cataclysm of making and unmaking? "