Acorn Character Quotes

If life has a base that it stands upon … then my [life] without a doubt stands upon this memory. It is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery of St. Ives. It is of hearing the waves … breaking, one, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind. It is of hearing the blind draw its little acorn across the floor as the wind blew the blind out. It is of lying and hearing … and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here … —Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past

What determines eminence is less a call to greatness than the call of character, that inability to be other than what you are in acorn, following it faithfully or being desperately driven by its dream.

But our task here is not to restore all the invisibles but to discriminate among them by attending to the one that once was called your daimon or genius, sometimes your soul or your fate, and now your acorn.

Crooks and criminals, sadistic guards and serial rapists—all the creatures large and small of the underworld—did their souls descend from the lap of Necessity? Again, Plotinus asked the question centuries ago: “How could a wicked character be given by the Gods?”1 Can one be called to murder? Can the acorn harbor a bad seed? Or, perhaps the criminal psychopath has no soul at all?

GEORGE Man-Walking held a sweet feeling for Mary Trout and her dog, Reno. Three weeks on the road, he'd come by, bring her trinkets, keepsakes from his route, a red thermometer, odd buttons, a pin made of acorns, soap. He'd have a bag for Reno, too, some chop bones, bits of biscuit. Mary died one summer and George took Reno home, kept bringing trinkets to the dog, filled its little house with stuff until it ran away.

A primordial loveliness resides in the etymological acorn; it dances with life and is full of projections; and it is as sensitive as the tip of the penis.