10
" Love is the soul of the world, though its body bleeds, and we must learn to bleed with it. Love is also the seed and milk and the fruit of the world, though we can partake of it in greed or reverence. We are born, we eat, and learn, and die. We leave a tracery of messages in the lives of others, a little shifting of the soil, a stone moved from here to there, a word uttered, a song, a poem left behind. I was here, each of these declare. I was here. "
― Michael D. O'Brien , The Island of the World
19
" Culture is the last refuge, the sanctuary, the human place in the midst of the surrounding dehumanization. Through the arts man is able to know himself, even if only on the intuitive level. He senses his own worth, even when he cannot articulate it.” “Can a poem or a song defeat a tyrant?” Defeat a killer, defeat atrocities, defeat the bottom falling out of the universe when you least expect it? “Yes. Yes, it can, given enough time. When a work of art is both beautiful and true, man’s freedom is strengthened by it—both his interior need for freedom and his capacity to seek a rational understanding of it.” “You hope for a lot.” “Yes, I hope for it. And if I didn’t, I would die of despair.” “You are a person of extremes”, Josip says, not unkindly. “Am I? I suppose so. But which is more extreme, a man who desires to speak the truth in a season of lies or a tyrant who creates the lies that engulf an entire people?” Josip nods in agreement. "
― Michael D. O'Brien , The Island of the World
