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1 " We know by intuition and study that great books approach a condition both above and below human — what Lesser means by “grandeur and intimacy” — and our job is to place ourselves somewhere on the continuum between those shifting poles, to welcome a gravid agitation or be willing to undergo some form of personal torsion; to have our personhood both threatened and amplified. "
― William Giraldi
2 " Be sweet to one another. Stay in this beauty and brawl against the world's power of pulling apart. Recall Old Testament terminology: covenant, sacred, sacrifice. And mind always that Adam wasn’t a schlep fruitily duped by Eve. He turned his back on God because he knew that a paradise without her was no paradise at all. "
― William Giraldi , Busy Monsters
3 " I looked up fairness in the dictionary and it was not there. "
4 " For a time I hovered in that peaceful dreamland where nothing at all works properly but everything is okay. "
5 " Most writers deserve the reputation posterity has bestowed upon them: You can’t for long conceal the toxic spots on your character—Philip Larkin is Exhibit A—nor can you conceal your dignity, your humanism, your regard for veracity and freedom. "
6 " Insecure or homicidal: the adjectives don't bother me one bit. "
7 " I keep wondering what would have happened if his unquiet mother had hoarded books instead of semiautomatic weapons. "
― William Giraldi , American Audacity: In Defense of Literary Daring
8 " Depending on the contemporary mood, Orwell oscillates from Saint George to George the Seer to George the Sage. What other thinker has been both so fervidly claimed and derided by both the left and right? Who else except Kafka do we credit with having seen the sinister future? When the NSA spying scandal broke in June, Amazon sales of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four vaulted more than 6000 percent. The connection of Big Brother with the NSA might have been hysterical and spurious, but it was also testament to our sentimental, kneejerk affection for Orwell, to the fact that he remains the default scribe whenever our paranoia is fondled by the ominous machinations of realpolitik. The utter clarity and goodness of his intellect seem something of a miracle when one considers how many of his fellow writers botched the most pressing moral and political tests of their time. He could smell bullshit and blood a continent away: When a passel of leftist intellectuals was hailing the Soviet Union as humankind’s only hope, Orwell was persistent in pointing out that Stalin was a monocratic lunatic. "
9 " To go peacefully in my sleep: that's the understandable wish of many, and I don't dispute the peaceful part. But to die and not be aware of it, not digest what's happening to you, not experience it, not glimpse the narrowed glare of the Reaper? That seems to me a stupendous deprivation and injustice. Next to being born, dying is the most important thing that ever happens to you. "
― William Giraldi , The Hero's Body: A Memoir
10 " He knew what haunted meant. The dead don’t haunt the living. The living haunt themselves. "
― William Giraldi , Hold the Dark
11 " Because he was beginning to fear that man belongs neither in civilization nor nature—because we are aberrations between two states of being. "
12 " Please quiet your strange self lest harm come to you. "
13 " A wolf expelled from its pack will travel hard distances to find another—to be accepted, to have kin. It wants to stanch hunger, sleep off fatigue, make itself anew. "
14 " What does it mean when what you have becomes equal to what you do, when what you own is essential to who you are? In our everyday grasp of owning things, we tag it materialism, consumerism, consumption. But I trust you'll agree that the possession of books is not identical to the possession of shoes. Someone with thousands of books is someone you want to talk to; someone with thousands of shoes is someone you suspect of soul-death. "
15 " Stunned by love and some would say stupid from too much sex, I decided I had to drive down south to kill a man. "
16 " You can always blame a person. The world ain’t nothing but persons, every goddamn one of them starved for something. "
17 " I'm a whole lot of God-help-us is what I am. "
18 " Quality reading exercises the crucial dialogue with yourself, the dialogue you must undergo to become yourself, to know where on the vista of existence you can place your own identity and awareness. "
19 " It’s shameful that today’s mouthy political expositors aren’t better versed in Orwell. Can you imagine a theatre director who hasn’t studied Shakespeare? "
20 " Why is this happening to me, Mr. Core? What myth has come true in my house?” “They’re just hungry wolves, Mrs. Slone. It’s no myth. It’s just hunger. No one’s cursed. Wolves will take kids if they need to. This is simple biology here. Simple nature.” He wanted to say: All myths are true. Every one is the only truth we have. "
