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In Paradise QUOTES

In Paradise QUOTES

1 " Maybe you're just wandering around out here with your thumb up your ass, waiting for some answer that might let you off the hook. "

― Peter Matthiessen , In Paradise

2 " By midafternoon soft snow is falling, muffling four voices that rise from the cardinal points around the circle, north, south, east, and west,intoning names from registration lists obtained by Rainer from museum archives in Berlin--long lists that represent but tiny fractions of that fraction of new prisoners who survived, however briefly, the first selections on this platform and were tattooed with small blue numbers. The impeccable lists include city and country of origin, arrival date, and date of death, not infrequently on that same day or the next.

Column after column, page after page, of the more common family names ascend softly from the circle of still figures to be borne away on gusts of wind-whirled snow. Schwartz, Herschel; Schwartz, Isaac A.; Schwartz, Isaac D.; Schwartz, Isidor--Who? Isidor? You too? The voices are all but inaudible as befits snuffed-out identities that exist only on lists, with no more reality than forgotten faces in old photo albums--Who's this bald guy in the back? Stray faces of no more significance than wind fragments of these names of long ago, of no more substance than this snowflake poised one moment on his pen before dissolving into voids beyond all Knowing. In Paradise 87-88 "

― Peter Matthiessen , In Paradise

3 " With the advent of this something-not-known (which he scarcely dares consider lest it vanish), the metastasizing animosities among the witness bearers are dissolving, as if the Dancing were sealing their acceptance of all woebegone humankind in all its greed and cruelties as the only creature capable of evil and the only one - surely those two are connected - aware that it must die. "

― Peter Matthiessen , In Paradise

4 " I think what we are feeling in this place is much too large for one simple soul to understand, too powerful. "

― Peter Matthiessen , In Paradise

5 " ...only to be wholly present in this moment, moment after moment "

― Peter Matthiessen , In Paradise

6 " The only whole heart is the broken heart. But it must be wholly broken "

― Peter Matthiessen , In Paradise

7 " The point of life is to help others through it "

― Peter Matthiessen , In Paradise