Monday quotes, again

1. Although we know the end of the maze holds death...I see now that the path I choose through that maze makes me what I am. I am not only a thing, but also a way of being - one of many ways - and knowing the paths I have followed and the ones left to take will help me understand what I am becoming. --Daniel Keyes, in Flowers for Algernon.

2. Music has the poiwer to abolish everything in the outside world except its souns, which go straight to the heart. --Gaston Leoureux

3. Hearts are not had as gifts, but hearts are earned. --W. B. Yeats

4. For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted and at two or tree times removed, when we know least about it. --R.W. Emerson

5. Never find fault with the absent. --Alexander Pope

1. Mom dying was hard on me. I still am drawn to stories about grief, but not grief for a parent - that's way too close. In fact, I refuse to read Dead Mommy books in general. I know why authors write them; it is a good way to give a protagonist a sympathetic struggle which keeps them from being too strong and perfect without alienating the reader with an actual failiing. I hate it, though - I think it is lazy now, and if it isn't a lazy bit of characterization, then it is the point of the story, which is so sad I can't bear to read it. So: no Dead Mommy stories. But I am still, sometimes, drawn to stories about grief, and Flowers for Algernon fits that perfectly. For about ten years there I read it faithfully once a year. I still love that book. Makes me cry every time.

2. It is very fitting that this was written by the creator of the Phantom of the Opera.

3. It's when you think they are presents that they slip away, because not only are hearts earned, but they must be earned again and again.

4. That platinum strip, that bit of divinity, that celestial fire - we feel it, even when we don't know why it is in us.

5. Alexander Pope just might be the truest humanist I've ever read.2. Music has the pwer to abolish everything in the outside wolrd except its sounds, which go straight to the heart. --Gaston Leoureux