Blindness Novel Quotes

The old law of an eye for an eye didn’t make them blind to the fact that another man’s terrorist wasn’t their freedom fighter.

It's true, reading too many novels makes you go blind.

Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels--the biggest sin is to be blind to others' problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.

The blind faith in some half-assed conspiracy theories lines up with the logic of having to believe in something with no questions asked. It gives us peace and comfort. As simple as I was, I found that resorting to this absolute nonsense was the root of all our problems. It was a road of willingly-learned helplessness, for no action could make a difference, thereby no action was needed.

Everyone makes mistakes, but only a few could forgive. Padahal ada banyak kesalahan yang hanya perlu dimaafkan, bukan dihukum. An eye for an eye will make us all blind.

it is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences... but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty.

...there it was one of those moments that is the opposite of blindness.

And you rage and scream and reach through the Force to crush the shadow who has destroyed you, but you are so far less now than what you were, you are more than half machine, you are like a painter gone blind, a composer gone deaf, you can remember where the power was but the power you can touch is only a memory, and so with all your world-destroying fury it is only droids around you that implode, and equipment, and the table on which you were strapped shatters, and in the end, you cannot touch the shadow. In the end you don't even want to. In the end, you do not even want to. In the end, the shadow is all you have left. Because the shadow understands you, the shadow forgives you, the shadow gathers you unto itself—And within your furnace heart, you burn in your own flame.

What I love is how pissed off Jane Eyre is. She's in a rage for the whole novel and the payoff is she gets to marry this blind guy who's toasted his wife in the attic." -Angela Argo "Blue Angel

I don’t know what it is. I simply can’t stand it. It’s like a hand reaching out of the dark. It is fear—blind fear as if it were lying in wait somewhere for me.

A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic - not that it advocates democracy but that by nature it is so. Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels - the biggest sin is to be blind to others' problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.

I avoided my eyes while brushing my teeth, then climbed into bed with a copy of _The Blind Assassin_, because if you're not with the book you want, you might as well want the book you're with. --Melissa Albert, _The Hazel Wood_

She pulled open the reception area door, bright sunshine causing her to pause, momentarily blinding her. Her eyes adjusted and she saw Josh, Peta and Daryl in deep conversation at an outdoor table. Saskia retreated, holding the door open. She saw Daryl lunge out of his bench, reach across the table, grab the front of Josh’s shirt and haul him close. Daryl’s mouth worked in angry lines and Josh’s head bowed, shaking back and forth slowly. Peta glanced nervously over her shoulder and towards the door of the administration building. She laid a hand on Daryl’s arm, leaning towards him. Daryl let Josh loose, sinking back into his seat. Josh also sat back, tugging his shirt into place.

Could one have a time-release epiphany, an epiphany without realizing it had happened? Or were they always trumpeted by angels and preceded by temporary blindness, Patrick wondered, as he walked down the corridor in the wrong direction.

that the human condition was so obviously exposed to the blind fury of chance that to trust in a God, a Jesus, the Holy Spirit—this last a completely superfluous entity, it was there only to make up a trinity, notoriously nobler than the mere binomial father-son—was the same thing as collecting trading cards while the city burns in the fires of hell.

They [human lives] are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven’s music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress. It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty.

I could probably write a book on the complexities of our relationship, on my constantly shifting emotions, my ever-changing mind, but let's just say that nothing is ever as black and white as it seems, that love is not only blind but pathetic too. It can make us into victims and fools, reduce us to the kind of people who infuriate us on soap operas, the kind you want to scream at for allowing the creep or bitch to walk all over them.

You thought I didn’t notice the way you two looked at each other? I may be old but I’m not blind. I remember that feeling. The spark, the electricity... ” I had to interject before I got the unabridged version of Anjali Does Mumbai.

I think poverty is not the worst thing in the world, blindness is, because blind people cannot see your beauty.

Most of the novels that I’ve read led me to believe quarrels come and go in the blink of an eye, a simple apology will bandage any problem and everything will be worked out within minutes. The novels lie. Maybe that’s why I’m so enamored with Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice; both are incredibly romantic in their own way, but they reveal the truth behind blind love and promises of forever

If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden. The two processes complement each other, creating a complete landscape that I treasure. The green foliage of the trees casts a pleasant shade over the earth, and the wind rustles the leaves, which are sometimes dyed a brilliant gold. Meanwhile, in the garden, buds appear on the flowers, and colorful petals attract bees and butterflies, reminding us of the subtle transition from one season to the next.

A novel takes the courage of a marathon runner, and as long as you have to run, you might as well be a winning marathon runner. Serendipity and blind faith faith in yourself won't hurt a thing. All the bastards in the world will snicker and sneer because they haven't the talent to zip up their flies by themselves. To hell with them, particularly the critics. Stand in there, son, no matter how badly you are battered and hurt.

Blind obedience is not the same as loyalty.

Your scorn for mediocrity blinds you to its vast primitive power. You stand in the glare of your own brilliance, unable to see into the dim corners of the room, to dilate your eyes and see the potential dangers of the mass, the wad of humanity. Even as I tell you this, dear student, you cannot quite believe that lesser men, in whatever numbers, can really defeat you. But we are in the age of the mediocre man. He is dull, colorless, boring — but inevitably victorious. The amoeba outlives the tiger because it divides and continues in its immortal monotony. The masses are the final tyrants. See how, in the arts, Kabuki wanes and withers while popular novels of violence and mindless action swamp the mind of the mass reader. And even in that timid genre, no author dares to produce a genuinely superior man as his hero, for in his rage of shame the mass man will send his yojimbo, the critic, to defend him. The roar of the plodders is inarticulate, but deafening. They have no brain, but they have a thousand arms to grasp and clutch at you, drag you down.

A garden path,' write the landscape architects Charles W. Moore, William J. Mitchell, and William Turnbull, 'can become the thread of a plot, connecting moments and incidents into a narrative. The narrative structure might be a simple chain of events with a beginning, middle, and end. It might be embellished with diversions, digressions, and picaresque twists, be accompanied by parallel ways (subplots), or deceptively fork into blind alleys like the alternative scenerios explored in a detective novel.

I may have loved to read my romance and smut novels, but I was not blinded by the 'fiction' part of it all. I knew the difference between what was real and what came from a hopeless romantic's imagination.

Letter 90 When I used to sit up late at night writing in our bed, I was calmed by the sound of your breathing. I would hold my breath and watch your chest rise and fall. I felt like a blind man soothed by the scents and sounds of a garden. As I lie here in bed writing this letter, there is only the sound of my own breathing. When I hold my breath, there is only silence. Tonight I feel like a miner being lowered farther and farther into a dark mine shaft, longing for the scents and the sounds of a garden.

Once in their youth the light shone for them; they saw the light and followed the star, but then came reason and the mockery of the world; then came faint-heartedness and apparent failure; then came weariness and disillusionment, and so they lost their way again, they became blind again.

If the shining sun blinds the eye,it makes sense. But to be blinded by gold and silver!

You took advantage of his blindness! Woe upon him, beset by your lies!

Anger, while it lasts, so blinds the heart that it is unable to discern the truth. It is a kind of enchanter, which can transform human nature. Anger is a shape-shifter, as stories tell us, for it strips people of their reason and totally changes their appearance, and transforms them from a human into the likeness of a beast.

But this flower was good-natured, always tenderhearted and compassionate. That’s why it met with trouble after trouble. It seemed to bring all this trouble on itself, but it also anticipated and accepted the consequences of such tenderness. If others thought that softness was a weakness, then it was they who were truly blind.

Somehow Geryon made it to adolescence. Then he met Herakles and the kingdoms of his life all shifted down a few notches. ... Geryon was going into the Bus Depot one Friday night about three a.m. to get change to call home. Herakles stepped oof the bus from New Mexico and Geryon came fast around the corner of the platform and there it was one of those moments that is the opposite of blindness. The world poured back and forth between their eyes once or twice.

When he whisked you away and hid you inside that cave, the way he spoke to you, the way he looked at you…even if you were blind or deaf, it would have been impossible not to understand his feelings.

Back at home they drew the curtains and read, with disapproval, with relish, with avidity and glee - even the ones who'd never thought of opening a novel before. There's nothing like a shovelful of dirt to encourage literacy.

In the late 1940s, a dystopian novel based on the notorious horrors of ‘National Socialism’ would probably have been very well-received. But it would have done nothing to shake the complacency of Western intellectuals concerning the system of state terror for which, at the time, so many of them had either a blind spot or a soft spot.

Stumbling closer, I held up the manuscript, the pages flapping frantically in the wind. “I take it this is a murder mystery? You killed the ex-fiancée and thanked her in the dedication? Mighty dignified of you, I must say.” “Nah. It’s a horror novel. But yeah, the bimbo dies in the end. Bob Hall says it’s going to be a bestseller, so I figured I owed her some thanks for the inspiration.” He edged a few feet closer, his smile spread from ear to ear. The glimmer in his eyes flickered toward the ocean, breaking our connection. He hung his head, licked his lips, then returned his eyes to mine, restoring the connection with an intense smolder. “Are you gonna get over here, or what?” Letting out a soft chuckle, the tears began to blind me. “Make me.

Imagination in these works is equated with empathy; we can't experience all that others have gone through, but we can understand even the most monstrous individuals in works of fiction. A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic—not that it advocates democracy but that by nature it is so. Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels—the biggest sin is to be blind to others' problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.

Atheism is a sort of crippled mysticism, [...] Blind nature has created all that we see, as well as all that we do not see - that's a mystical notion.

To begin with, you must realize that the threatening letters were in the nature of a blind. They might have been lifted bodily out of an indifferently written American crime novel.

We’ve all acted like sheep, blindly following the herd and leaning on our Powers in lieu of knowledge. But knowledge is what could save us.

No, when the herd wanted to take refuge in an idea, it preferred to be blind to that idea’s opposite.

Later, with time, we no longer need a shawl over our eyes or grass in our ears. The one playing the blind man simply turns his gaze inward, and the deaf one shuts his ears to all sounds

the real failure: that he couldn’t be the sort of father he wanted to be, a man who had transcended his ancestral muddle and offered his children unhaunted love. He had made it out of what he thought of as Zone One, where a parent was doomed to make his child experience what he had hated most about his life, but he was still stuck in Zone Two, where the painstaking avoidance of Zone One blinded him to fresh mistakes. In Zone Two giving was based on what the giver lacked. Nothing was more exhausting than this deficiency-driven, overcompensating zeal. He dreamt of Zone Three. He sensed that it was there, just over the hill, like the rumour of a fertile valley.

Naturally – she's an actress." He laughed wryly to himself. "Complications. Oh, yes." The doctor reflected and then said, "I always think a life without complications isn't really a life, you know. In life things go wrong, nothing stays the same and there's nothing you can do about it. Friends betray you, family is a nightmare, lovers are fickle. This is the norm, no?" He smiled to himself, as if remembering something pertinent. "What kind of a world would it be where nothing ever went wrong, where everything stayed the same, life followed a designated path – family was adorable, friends and lovers were faithful and true?" He paused. "You know, I don't think I'd like that kind of a world. We're made for complications, we human beings. Anyway, such a perfect world could never exist – at least not on this small planet.

The growing children are misshapen by those parents who were in various ways warped by the blindness, ignorance, and passions of their own parents; and one’s own errors impoverish and cripple one’s children? Such is the endless chain of the generations?

Early in the novel that Tereza clutched under her arm when she went to visit Tomas, Anna meets Vronsky in curious circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train. At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself under a train. This symmetrical composition - the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end - may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as "fictive," "fabricated," and "untrue to life" into the word "novelistic." Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress. It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

Indeed he seemed to her sometimes made differently from other people, born blind, deaf, and dumb, to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinary things, with an eye like an eagle’s. His understanding often astonished her. But did he notice the flowers? No. Did he notice the view? No. Did he even notice his own daughter’s beauty, or whether there was pudding on his plate or roast beef? He would sit at table with them like a person in a dream.

Not to waste the spring I threw down everything, And ran into the open world To sing what I could sing... To dance what I could dance! And join with everyone! I wandered with a reckless heart beneath the newborn sun. First stepping through the blushing dawn, I crossed beneath a garden bower, counting every hermit thrush, counting every hour. When morning's light was ripe at last, I stumbled on with reckless feet; and found two nymphs engaged in play, approaching them stirred no retreat. With naked skin, their weaving hands, in form akin to Calliope's maids, shook winter currents from their hair to weave within them vernal braids. I grabbed the first, who seemed the stronger by her soft and dewy leg, and swore blind eyes, Lest I find I, before Diana, a hunted stag. But the nymphs they laughed, and shook their heads. and begged I drop beseeching hands. For one was no goddess, the other no huntress, merely two girls at play in the early day. "Please come to us, with unblinded eyes, and raise your ready lips. We will wash your mouth with watery sighs, weave you springtime with our fingertips." So the nymphs they spoke, we kissed and laid, by noontime's hour, our love was made, Like braided chains of crocus stems, We lay entwined, I laid with them, Our breath, one glassy, tideless sea, Our bodies draping wearily. We slept, I slept so lucidly, with hopes to stay this memory. I woke in dusty afternoon, Alone, the nymphs had left too soon, I searched where perched upon my knees Heard only larks' songs in the trees. "Be you, the larks, my far-flung maids? With lilac feet and branchlike braids... Who sing sweet odes to my elation, in your larking exaltation!" With these, my clumsy, carefree words, The birds they stirred and flew away, "Be I, poor Actaeon," I cried, "Be dead… Before they, like Hippodamia, be gone astray!" Yet these words, too late, remained unheard, By lark, that parting, morning bird. I looked upon its parting flight, and smelled the coming of the night; desirous, I gazed upon its jaunt, as Leander gazes Hellespont. Now the hour was ripe and dark, sensuous memories of sunlight past, I stood alone in garden bowers and asked the value of my hours. Time was spent or time was tossed, Life was loved and life was lost. I kissed the flesh of tender girls, I heard the songs of vernal birds. I gazed upon the blushing light, aware of day before the night. So let me ask and hear a thought: Did I live the spring I’d sought? It's true in joy, I walked along, took part in dance, and sang the song. and never tried to bind an hour to my borrowed garden bower; nor did I once entreat a day to slumber at my feet. Yet days aren't lulled by lyric song, like morning birds they pass along, o'er crests of trees, to none belong; o'er crests of trees of drying dew, their larking flight, my hands, eschew Thus I'll say it once and true… From all that I saw, and everywhere I wandered, I learned that time cannot be spent, It only can be squandered.

It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR CHESTER HIMES was born in Missouri in 1909. He began writing while serving a prison sentence for a jewel theft and published just short of twenty novels before his death in 1984. Among his best-known thrillers are Cotton Comes to Harlem, The Crazy Kill, A Rage in Harlem, The Real Cool Killers, and The Heat’s On, all available from Vintage.

When I lifted up the skin, a fat kidney worm dripping with gore raised its bald, blind head and glared at me.

Richard Wright, a Mississippi-born negro, has written a blinding and corrosive study in hate. It is a novel entitled "Native Son".

Just cause I’m blind don’t mean I can’t see.

people shouting that if he could heal the sick and make the crippled walk and the blind see, then he could raise the dead.

Her anger was against herself, for her frivolity and her blindness.

I confess that I have been as blind as a mole, but it is better to learn wisdom late than never to learn it at all.

The desire for pleasure which Cronshaw said was the only motive of human action urged them blindly on,

...you are my star, Kaitlin. I follow you blindly...Did you know that stars don't shine? They burn....

a man will never choose to be healed from his blindness until he first realizes he cannot see.

Blind science tills vain colds, mad Faith lives the dream of its cult, a new God is only a word, Don't believe or search, all is hidden.

and there it was one of those moments that is the opposite of blindness. The world poured back and forth between their eyes once or twice.

Joe Keohane, “Politically Correct ‘Lord of the Flies,’” The New Yorker, September 9, 2015 This humorous essay recasts many of the novel’s most emblematic moments in a mashup of politically correct sensibilities. Here debates aren’t about who should be chief; instead they’re about the need to eschew noninclusive language, create a safe space, and recognize the blind spots that accompany positions of privilege. A great example of how satire asks us to poke fun at ourselves, and a text that adds welcome levity to discussions of an otherwise dark novel.

She answered that she loved to read novels. The Rebbe responded that as novels are fiction, what you read in them is not necessarily what happens in real life. It’s not as if two people meet and there is a sudden, blinding storm of passion. That’s not what love or life is, or should be, about. Rather, he said, two people meet and there might be a glimmer of understanding, like a tiny flame. And then, as these people decide to build a home together, and raise a family, and go through the everyday activities and daily tribulations of life, this little flame grows even brighter and develops into a much bigger flame until these two people, who started out as virtual strangers, become intertwined to such a point that neither of them can think of life without the other. This is what true love is about, the Rebbe told Sharfstein. “It’s the small acts that you do on a daily basis that turn two people from a ‘you and I’ into an ‘us.

[Author's note:] When I decided to write this book, I worried that my privilege would make me blind to certain truths, that I would get things wrong, as I may well have. I worried that, as a non-immigrant and non-Mexican, I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set entirely among migrants. I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it. But then I thought, 'If you're a person who has the capacity to be a bridge, why not be a bridge?' So I began. In the early days of my research, before I'd fully convinced myself that I should undertake the telling of this story, I was interviewing a very generous scholar, a remarkable woman who was chair of the Chicana and Chicano studies Department at San Diego State University. Her name is Norma Iglesias Prieto, and I mentioned my doubts to her. I told her I felt compelled, but unqualified, to write this book. She said, "Jeanine. We need as many voices as we can get, telling this story." Her encouragement sustained me for the next four years. I was careful and deliberate in my research. I traveled extensively on both sides of the border and learned as much as I could about Mexico and migrants, about people living throughout the borderlands. The statistics in this book are all true, and though I changed some names, most of the places are real, too. But the characters, while representative of the folks I met during my travels, are fictional.

The Lord is like lightening. Startled by its appearance and momentarily blinded by the brightness of the flash, when the lightening strikes a person is either destroy or jolted to new life." Elias the Teacher

In the novel Fight Club, the character Jack’s apartment is blown up. All of his possessions—“every stick of furniture,” which he pathetically loved—were lost. Later it turns out that Jack blew it up himself. He had multiple personalities, and “Tyler Durden” orchestrated the explosion to shock Jack from the sad stupor he was afraid to do anything about. The result was a journey into an entirely different and rather dark part of his life. In Greek mythology, characters often experience katabasis—or “a going down.” They’re forced to retreat, they experience a depression, or in some cases literally descend into the underworld. When they emerge, it’s with heightened knowledge and understanding. Today, we’d call that hell—and on occasion we all spend some time there. We surround ourselves with bullshit. With distractions. With lies about what makes us happy and what’s important. We become people we shouldn’t become and engage in destructive, awful behaviors. This unhealthy and ego-derived state hardens and becomes almost permanent. Until katabasis forces us to face it. Duris dura franguntur. Hard things are broken by hard things. The bigger the ego the harder the fall. It would be nice if it didn’t have to be that way. If we could nicely be nudged to correct our ways, if a quiet admonishment was what it took to shoo away illusions, if we could manage to circumvent ego on our own. But it is just not so. The Reverend William A. Sutton observed some 120 years ago that “we cannot be humble except by enduring humiliations.” How much better it would be to spare ourselves these experiences, but sometimes it’s the only way the blind can be made to see.

That which I have seen, in that one little moment, will never go out from my memory, but will abide there; and I shall see it all the days, and dream of it all the nights, till I die. Would God I had been blind!

And so it came to pass, that Joshua of Nazareth moved among them, healing them and performing miracles, and all the little blind children of Nicobar did see again, and all the lame did stand up and walk. The little fuckers.   And

We are just too blinded by the phrase, "grow old together" and learning its meaning from hopeless movies and novels that glorify undying love and unbelievable understanding. Don't you think? Reality is... Love dies. People change. And we grow old together in present. Today, tomorrow, and every day after that. It's not about eternity. It's not till death do us part. It's about today. This day. And I believe only in today. So, come! Let's grow old together today!

As for Proust, his contribution has been to create, from an obstinate contemplation of reality, a closed world that belonged only to him and that indicated his victory over the transitoriness of things and over death. But he uses absolutely the opposite means. He upholds, above everything, by a deliberate choice, a careful selection of unique experience, which the writer chooses from the most secret recesses of his past. Immense empty spaces are thus discarded from life because they have left no trace in the memory. If the American novel is the novel of men without memory, the world of Proust is nothing but memory. It is concerned only with the most difficult and most exacting of memories, the memory that rejects the dispersion of the actual world and derives, from the trace of a lingering perfume, the secret of a new and ancient universe. Proust chooses the interior life and, of the interior life, that which is more interior than life itself in preference to what is forgotten in the world of reality— in other words, the purely mechanical and blind aspects of the world. But by his rejection of reality he does not deny reality. He does not commit the error, which would counterbalance the error of American fiction, of suppressing the mechanical. He unites, on the contrary, into a superior form of unity, the memory of the past and the immediate sensation, the twisted foot and the happy days of times past.

It’s the scars that tell you who people are and that help you understand their motives. Understanding scars breeds compassion, and compassion breeds sight, and sight leads to forgiveness. How blind humans are while they think they see so clearly.…

Bob Hope: You live here? Richard Carlson: Yes. Bob Hope: Well, maybe you know what a zombie is? Richard Carlson: When a person dies and is buried, it seems a certain voodoo priest will have the power to bring him back to life. Paulette Goddard: That's horrible! Richard Carlson: It's worse than horrible, because a zombie has no will of his own. You see them some times, walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring. Bob Hope: You mean, like Democrats?

Blijft het feit dat ik mijn hand opstak en zei dat het menselijke lot zo duidelijk aan de blinde razernij van het toeval was blootgesteld dat jezelf aan een God toevertrouwen hetzelfde was als plaatjes verzamelen terwijl de stad brandt in het hellevuur.

Apollodorus, the leading classical authority on Greek myths, records a tradition that the real scene of the poem was the Sicilian seaboard, and in 1896 Samuel Butler, the author of Erewhon, came independently to the same conclusion. He suggested that the poem, as we now have it, was composed at Drepanum, the modern Trapani, in Western Sicily, and that the authoress was the girl self-portrayed as Nausicaa. None of his classical contemporaries, for whom Homer was necessarily both blind and bearded, deigned to pay Butler’s theory the least attention; and since he had, as we now know, dated the poem some three hundred years too early and not explained how a Sicilian princess could have passed off her saga as Homer’s, his two books on the subject are generally dismissed as a good-humoured joke. Nevertheless, while working on an explanatory dictionary of Greek myths, I found Butler’s arguments for a Western Sicilian setting and for a female authorship irrefutable. I could not rest until I had written this novel. It re-creates, from internal and external evidence, the circumstances which induced Nausicaa to write the Odyssey, and suggest how, as an honorary Daughter of Homer, she managed to get it included in the official canon. Here is the story of a high-spirited and religious-minded Sicilian girl who saves her father’s throne from usurpation, herself from a distasteful marriage, and her two younger brothers from butchery by boldly making things happen, instead of sitting still and hoping for the best.

It had a strange resemblance to Kafka's novel,The Trial- that dream-like allegory of a man who,having received a mysterious convocation to attend his 'trial",strives and struggles in vain to find out where the trial would be held and what it would be about; wherever he inquires he receives non - commital,elusive replies,as if everybody has joined in a secret conspiracy:the closer he gets to his aim,the farther it recedes,like the transparent walls of a dream:and the story ends abruptly,as it began,in tormenting suspense.The High Court which Kafka's hero is unable to find is his own conscience:but what was the symbolic meaning of all these nut-cracker-faced,nail-biting,pimpled,slimy features,spinning their spider webs of intrigue and sabotage in the bureaux of the French Administration?Perhaps I was really guilty,I and my like:perhaps our guilt was the past,the guilt of having forseen the catastrophe and yet failed to open the eyes of the blind.But if we were guilty-who were they to sit in judgement over us?

I know that western sky. Sometimes when I'm alone painting, a blind lifts and I let my mind drift back. I remember walking out into the red sun in Canyon until the night fell. I'd lie down on the scorched hardness of the desert floor, looking up at the stars raining down like small silver bullets into me. It was all I wanted then – to feel that roar of the infinite that exists within our finite selves. At times it seemed unbearable – that hunger I felt once – like the edges of my skin could not contain it. I miss that.

was standing facing my car, and behind me, I could hear windows being thrown open in my apartment building. It was Lorraine in her nightie and Mo in his cap. They’d just settled their brains for a long winter’s nap in front of the television. When out in the lot there arose such a clatter, they sprang from their recliners to see what was the matter. Away to the window they flew like a flash, tore open the blinds and threw up the sash. And what to their wondering eyes should appear, but Stephanie Plum and yet another of her cars burning front to rear.

The end of this short story could be a rather disturbing thing, if it came true. I hope you like it, and if you do, be sure to COMMENT and SHARE. Paradoxes of Destiny? Dani! My boy! Are you all right? Where are you? Have you hurt yourself? Are you all right? Daniiii! Why won’t you answer? It’s so cold and dark here. I can’t see a thing… It’s so silent. Dani? Can you hear me? I shouldn’t have looked at that text message while I was driving… I shouldn’t have done it! I'm so stupid sometimes! Son, are you all right?... We really wrecked the car when we rolled it! I can’t see or hear a thing… Am I in hospital? Am I dead…? Dani? Your silence is killing me… Are you all right?! I can see a glimmer of light. I feel trapped. Dani, are you there? I can’t move. It’s like I’m wrapped in this mossy green translucent plastic. I have to get out of here. The light is getting more and more intense. I think I can tear the wrapping that’s holding me in. I'm almost out. The light is blinding me. What a strange place. I've never seen anything like it. It doesn’t look like Earth. Am I dead? On another planet? Oh God, look at those hideous monsters! They’re so creepy and disgusting! They look like extraterrestrials. They’re aliens! I'm on another planet! I can’t believe it. I need to get the hell out here. Those monsters are going to devour me. I have to get away. I’m so scared. Am I floating? Am I flying? I’m going to go higher to try to escape. I can’t see the aliens anymore and the landscape looks less terrifying. I think I've made it. It’s very windy. Is that a highway? I think I can see some vehicles down there. Could they be the extraterrestrials’ transport? I’m going to go down a bit. I see people! Am I on Earth? Could this be a parallel universe? Where could Dani be? I shouldn’t have looked at that text message while I was driving. I shouldn’t… That tower down there looks a lot like the water tank in my town… It’s identical. But the water tank in my town doesn’t have that huge tower block next to it. It all looks very similar to my neighborhood, but it isn’t exactly the same: there are a lot of tower blocks here. There’s the river… and the factory. It’s definitely my neighborhood, but it looks kind of different. I must be in a parallel universe… It’s amazing that I can float. People don’t seem to notice my presence. Am I a ghost? I have to get back home and see if Dani’s there. God, I hope he’s safe and sound. Gabriela must be out of her mind with the crash. There’s my house! Home sweet home. And whose are those cars? The front of the house has been painted a different color… This is all so strange! There’s someone in the garden… Those trees I planted in the spring have really grown. Is… is that… Dani? Yes, yes! It’s Dani. But he looks so different… He looks older, he looks… like a big boy! What’s important is that he’s OK. I need to hug him tight and tell him how much I love him. Can he see me if I’m a ghost? I'll go up to him slowly so I don’t scare him. I need to hold him tight. He can’t see me, I won’t get any closer. He moved his head, I think he’s started to realize I’m here… Wow I’m so hungry all of a sudden! I can’t stop! How are you doing, son?! It’s me! Your dad! My dear boy? I can’t stop! I'm too hungry! Ahhhh, so delicious! What a pleasure! Nooo Daniii! Nooooo!.... I’m your daaaad!... Splat!... “Mum, bring the insect repellent, the garden’s full of mosquitoes,” grunted Daniel as he wiped the blood from the palm of his hand on his trousers. Gabriela was just coming out. She did an about turn and went back into her house, and shouted “Darling, bring the insect repellent, it’s on the fireplace…” Absolute cold and silence… THE END (1) This note is for those who have read EQUINOX—WHISPERS OF DESTINY. This story is a spin-off of the novel EQUINOX—WHISPERS OF DESTINY and revolves around Letus’s curious theories about the possibility of animal reincarnation.

The quiet brings to mind the multitude of men and women living out their days in solitude—each convinced that their fears and wants are unique to themselves—and she longs to press herself into their fold and be counted among those whose lives are meshed with the turning of the world.

But when the smallest thing enters your mind, form will appear. And when there is form, there will be an opponent and there will be yourself. Facing each other, there will be conflict; and in a situation like this, the mysterious functions of change and metamorphosis will not occur with freedom. First, your mind will fall into thoughts of death and you will lose all clarity of spirit. How then will you stand readily and with resolve for a fight? Even if you should win, it would be what is called a blind victory, and this is not the true object of the art of swordsmanship.

She was only a year or two older than Musashi, but how different they were in their experience of love. Watching him sit so stiffly, restraining his emotions, avoiding her face as though a look at her might blind him, she felt once again like a sheltered maiden experiencing the first pangs of love.

God preserve me from novel-writing, thought Mrs Touchet. God preserve me from that tragic indulgence, that useless vanity, that blindness! In a cold dormitory, two hundred miles away, three heartbroken, motherless girls had hoped to be visited by their father. But William was busy at his desk, dreaming up Jack Sheppard.

The Three-Decker "The three-volume novel is extinct." Full thirty foot she towered from waterline to rail. It cost a watch to steer her, and a week to shorten sail; But, spite all modern notions, I found her first and best— The only certain packet for the Islands of the Blest. Fair held the breeze behind us—’twas warm with lovers’ prayers. We’d stolen wills for ballast and a crew of missing heirs. They shipped as Able Bastards till the Wicked Nurse confessed, And they worked the old three-decker to the Islands of the Blest. By ways no gaze could follow, a course unspoiled of Cook, Per Fancy, fleetest in man, our titled berths we took With maids of matchless beauty and parentage unguessed, And a Church of England parson for the Islands of the Blest. We asked no social questions—we pumped no hidden shame— We never talked obstetrics when the Little Stranger came: We left the Lord in Heaven, we left the fiends in Hell. We weren’t exactly Yussufs, but—Zuleika didn’t tell. No moral doubt assailed us, so when the port we neared, The villain had his flogging at the gangway, and we cheered. ’Twas fiddle in the forc’s’le—’twas garlands on the mast, For every one got married, and I went ashore at last. I left ’em all in couples a-kissing on the decks. I left the lovers loving and the parents signing cheques. In endless English comfort by county-folk caressed, I left the old three-decker at the Islands of the Blest! That route is barred to steamers: you’ll never lift again Our purple-painted headlands or the lordly keeps of Spain. They’re just beyond your skyline, howe’er so far you cruise In a ram-you-damn-you liner with a brace of bucking screws. Swing round your aching search-light—’twill show no haven’s peace. Ay, blow your shrieking sirens to the deaf, gray-bearded seas! Boom out the dripping oil-bags to skin the deep’s unrest— And you aren’t one knot the nearer to the Islands of the Blest! But when you’re threshing, crippled, with broken bridge and rail, At a drogue of dead convictions to hold you head to gale, Calm as the Flying Dutchman, from truck to taffrail dressed, You’ll see the old three-decker for the Islands of the Blest. You’ll see her tiering canvas in sheeted silver spread; You’ll hear the long-drawn thunder ’neath her leaping figure-head; While far, so far above you, her tall poop-lanterns shine Unvexed by wind or weather like the candles round a shrine! Hull down—hull down and under—she dwindles to a speck, With noise of pleasant music and dancing on her deck. All’s well—all’s well aboard her—she’s left you far behind, With a scent of old-world roses through the fog that ties you blind. Her crew are babes or madmen? Her port is all to make? You’re manned by Truth and Science, and you steam for steaming’s sake? Well, tinker up your engines—you know your business best— She’s taking tired people to the Islands of the Blest!

Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness. The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means towards it. Inside

[Rinda] often worried how she might make the coward she saw [in Remus] into a brave warrior, and someday, a king -- a task which she felt was her responsibility. Rinda had not yet realized that sometimes courage is the same thing as folly and that sometimes a skepticism bordering on her blindness to her brother's strengths was a result of her own sensitivity.

The Future is an illusion because, at the most fundamental level, Choice is an illusion. I am a believer in the theory, popular among physicists, that every time there is a Choice, the universe splits: both choices come to pass, but in now-separate universes. And so on, and on, with every choice of every particle, every atom, every molecule, every cell, every being, coming into being. In this universe of universes, everything happens, and every combination of things happens. Our universe is a mote of dust in an ever-growing dust-storm of possibilities, but each mote of dust in that storm is generating its own dust-storm of possibilities every instant, the motes of which in turn... But you get the general impression. Indeed to think of ourselves as single selves, and our universe as a single universe, is to be blinded, by the limitations of our senses and our consciousness, to the infinite-faceted truth: that we are infinite in a universe of universes that are each infinitely infinite..." "An intriguingly intricate view of the world," I said (...) Pat Sheeran nodded. "And it is astonishing how little practical difference it makes," he said. "All my other lives are as inaccessible to me as if they did not exist at all. No doubt in other universes I am a beggar, a revolutionary thinker, an academic, an accountant; a drinker, a thinker, a writer of books; I lose a freckle, gain a mole, shade off into men nothing like me at all; I have sons, fire guns, live forever, die too young. Whenever any particle in this universe changes state, I am split and travel in both directions, multiplied. But here I am, suffering the illusion of unity in this endlessly bifurcating moment. Yet sometimes, I wave my arms for the joy of creating a spray of universes." I said startled at the implications, “Though it may make no practical difference, the implications are nonetheless startling." "Indeed," said Pat Sheeran. "I had immediately to file all the fiction on my shelves under Non-Fiction. For it is an unavoidable corollary of this theory, that Fiction is impossible. For all novels are true histories of worlds as real as ours, but which we cannot see. All stories are possible, all histories have happened. I, billion-bodied, live a trillion lives every quantum instant. Those trillion lives branch out, a quintillion times a second, as every particle in every atom in each mote of dust on land, in sea, and sky, and space, and star, flickering in and out of being in the void, hesitates and decides its next stage. All tragedies, all triumphs, are mine, are yours." "It is a curious and difficult thing, to think that all is possible. No, probable. No, certain," I said, attempting to grasp the largeness of the thought."That nothing is improbable." "It is a comforting thought, some nights, to this version of me, now," said Pat Sheeran, and we roared on.

Why are those who knew him, when they pass from the memory of a young man, sensitive and gay, to the work – novels and writings – surprised to pass into a nocturnal world, a world of cold torment, a world not without light but in which light blinds at the same time that it illuminates; gives hope, but makes hope the shadow of anguish and despair? Why is it that he who, in his work, passes from the objectivity of the narratives to the intimacy of the Diary, descends into a still darker night in which the cries of a lost man can be heard? Why does it seem that the closer one comes to his heart, the closer one comes to an unconsoled center from which a piercing flash sometimes bursts forth, an excess of pain, excess of joy? Who has the right to speak of Kafka without making this enigma heard, an enigma that speaks with the complexity, with the simplicity, of enigma?

That fact remains that I, who had successfully completed a theological correspondence course, raised my hand and said that the human condition was so obviously exposed to the blind fury of chance that to trust in a God, a Jesus, the Holy Spirit - this last a completely superfluous entity, it was there only to make up a trinity, notoriously nobler than the mere binomial father-son - was the same thing as collecting trading cards while the city burns in the fires of hell.

I listen with the air of an eager disciple as he propounds things that I have thought ever since I began my studies. Now he is glancing into books that I have read and hidden for my own safety, and he tells me the things that strike him as if they are a great novelty and I should learn them from him. Little Lady Jane Grey knows these opinions, Princess Elizabeth has read them; I taught them both myself. But now I sit beside the king and exclaim when he describes the blindingly obvious, I admire his discovery of the widely known, and I remark on his perception.

The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know — Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel — the quality of philosophy. I find that I read with the same kind of curiosity most novels, and a book of reportage. Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness. The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means towards it.

… ! And would I have been this way, would I have been this way on this night, and at this moment, sitting with you now, would I be talking like this, would I be moving like this, would I look at you and at the world like this, if I really were a parricide, when even the inadvertent killing of Grigory gave me no rest all night—not from fear, oh! not just from fear of your punishment! The disgrace of it! And you want me to reveal and tell about yet another new meanness of mine, yet another new disgrace, to such scoffers as you, who do not see anything and do not believe anything, blind moles and scoffers, even if it would save me from your accusation?

You ask if I miss having my vision. And I give you polite answers and deflections so you won't worry about me. But I'm not afraid of blindness. I made sure when I was young to see everything. The ocean, the sky, every kind of person on Earth, all the animals that were left before they were gone. I even saw space from inside, the Earth as it trailed away behind us - even if only in my mind. I've seen sunrise on Mars and my own baby, though she's nearly grown up now and doesn't talk to me much. "I'm about as afraid to die as I am of being blind. What else is there to do or see? I've seen it all, and all that's left is reminders that it's gone, all of it gone.

Relying on our acquired knowledge, we have ventured to discuss the question: Whether the soul is created before us? Whether it arrives from nothing in our bodies? At what age it came and placed itself between the bladder and the intestines, "cæcum" and "rectum"? Whether it received or brought there any ideas, and what those ideas are? Whether, after animating us for a few moments, its essence is to live after us in eternity, without the intervention of God Himself? Whether, it being a spirit, and God being spirit, they are of like nature? These questions have an appearance of sublimity. What are they but questions of men born blind discussing the nature of light?

The priest first read a condensed lesson of sacred history. Felicite evoked Paradise, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, the blazing cities, the dying nations, the shattered idols; and out of this she developed a great respect for the Almighty and a great fear of His wrath. Then, when she had listened to the Passion, she wept. Why had they crucified Him who loved little children, nourished the people, made the blind see, and who, out of humility, had wished to be born among the poor, in a stable? The sowings, the harvests, the wine-presses, all those familiar things which the Scriptures mention, formed a part of her life; the word of God sanctified them; and she loved the lambs with increased tenderness for the sake of the Lamb, and the doves because of the Holy Ghost. She

The Bostonians is special because it never was ‘titivated’ for the New York edition, for its humour and its physicality, for its direct engagement with social and political issues and the way it dramatized them, and finally for the extent to which its setting and action involved the author and his sense of himself. But the passage above suggests one other source of its unique quality. It has been called a comedy and a satire – which it is. But it is also a tragedy, and a moving one at that. If its freshness, humour, physicality and political relevance all combine to make it a peculiarly accessible and enjoyable novel, it is also an upsetting and disturbing one, not simply in its treatment of Olive, but also of what she tries to stand for. (Miss Birdseye is an important figure in this respect: built up and knocked down as she is almost by fits and starts.) The book’s jaundiced view of what Verena calls ‘the Heart of humanity’ (chapter 28) – reform, progress and the liberal collectivism which seems so essential an ingredient in modern democracy – makes it contentious to this day. An aura of scepticism about the entire political process hangs about it: salutary some may say; destructive according to others. And so, more than any other novel of James’s, it reminds us of the literature of our own time. The Bostonians is one of the most brilliant novels in the English language, as F. R. Leavis remarked;27 but it is also one of the bleakest. In no other novel did James reveal more of himself, his society and his era, and of the human condition, caught as it is between the blind necessity of progress and the urge to retain the old. It is a remarkably experimental modern novel, written by a man of conservative values. It is judgemental about people with whom its author identified, and lenient towards attitudes hostile to large areas of James’s own intellectual and personal inheritance. The strength of the contradictions embodied in the novel are a guarantee of the pleasure it has to give.

It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but who hath duly Considered or set forth the power of Ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down. Knowledge, through patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of it; Ignorance, wanting its day’s dinner, lights a fire with the record, and gives a flavor to its one roast with the burned souls of many generations. Knowledge, instructing the sense, refining and multiplying needs, transforms itself into skill and makes life various with a new six days’ work; comes Ignorance drunk on the seventh, with a firkin of oil and a match and an easy “Let there not be,” and the many-colored creation is shriveled up in blackness. Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy dark as a buried Babylon.

Er stand einen Moment und sah auf den offenen Körper unter den weißen Tüchern. Das grelle Licht machte die Tücher noch weißer, wie frischer Schnee, unter dem der rote Krater der klaffenden Wunde gähnte. Kate Hegström, vierunddreißig Jahre alt, kapriziös, schmal, braun, trainiert, voll von Willen zum Leben – zum Tode verurteilt durch den neblig unsichtbaren Griff, der ihre Zellen zerstört hatte. Er beugte sich wieder über den Körper. „Wir müssen ja noch –“ Das Kind. In diesem zerfallenden Körper wuchs ja noch blind ein tappendes Leben heran. Verurteilt mit ihm. Noch fressend, saugend, gierig, nichts als Trieb zum Wachsen, irgendetwas, das einmal spielen wollte in Gärten, das irgendetwas werden wollte, Ingenieur, Priester, Soldat, Mörder, Mensch, etwas, das leben, leiden, glücklich sein wollte und zerbrechen – vorsichtig ging das Instrument die unsichtbare Wand entlang – fand den Widerstand, brach ihn behutsam, brachte ihn heraus – vorbei. Vorbei mit all dem unbewußten Kreisen, vorbei mit dem ungelebten Atem, Jubel, Klage, Wachsen, Werden. Nichts mehr als etwas totes, bleiches Fleisch und etwas gerinnendes Blut.

Hundreds of men crowded the yard, and not a one among them was whole. They covered the ground thick as maggots on a week old carcass, the dirt itself hardly anywhere visible. No one could move without all feeling it and thus rising together in a hellish contortion of agony. Everywhere men moaned, shouting for water and praying for God to end their suffering. They screamed and groaned in an unending litany, calling for mothers and wives and fathers and sisters. The predominant color was blue, though nauseations of red intruded throughout. Men lay half naked, piled on top of one another in scenes to pitiful to imagine. Bloodied heads rested on shoulders and laps, broken feet upon arms. Tired hands held in torn guts and torsos twisted every which way. Dirty shirts dressed the bleeding bodies and not enough material existed in all the world to sop up the spilled blood. A boy clad in gray, perhaps the only rebel among them, lay quietly in one corner, raised arm rigid with a finger extended, as if pointing to the heavens. His face was a singular portrait of contentment among the misery. Broken bones, dirty white and soiled with the passing of hours since injury, were everywhere abundant. All manner of devices splinted the damaged and battered limbs: muskets, branches, bayonets, lengths of wood or iron from barns and carts. One individual had bone splinted with bone: the dried femur of a horse was lashed to his busted shin. A blind man, his eyes subtracted by the minié ball that had enfiladed him, moaned over and over “I’m kilt, I’m kilt! Oh Gawd, I’m kilt!” Others lay limp, in shock. These last were mostly quiet, their color unnaturally pale. It was agonizingly humid in the still air of the yard. The stink of blood mixed with human waste produced a potent and offensive odor not unlike that of a hog farm in the high heat of a South Carolina summer. Swarms of fat, green blowflies everywhere harassed the soldiers to the point of insanity, biting at their wounds. Their steady buzz was a noise straight out of hell itself, a distress to the ears.

What is the matter with her?” Lillian asked Daisy, bewildered by her mother’s docile manner. It was nice not to have to scrap and spar with Mercedes, but at the same time, now was when Lillian would have expected Mercedes to mow her over like a charging horse brigade. Daisy shrugged and replied puckishly, “One can only assume that since you’ve done the opposite of everything she has advised, and you seem to have brought Lord Westcliff up to scratch, Mother has decided to leave the matter in your hands. I predict that she will turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to anything you do, so long as you manage to keep the earl’s interest.” “Then… if I steal away to Lord Westcliff’s room later this evening, she won’t object?” Daisy gave a low laugh. “She would probably help you to sneak up there, if you asked.” She gave Lillian an arch glance. “Just what are you going to do with Lord Westcliff, alone in his room?” Lillian felt herself flush. “Negotiate.” “Oh. Is that what you call it?” Biting back a smile, Lillian narrowed her eyes. “Don’t be saucy, or I won’t tell you the lurid details later.” “I don’t need to hear them from you,” Daisy said airily. “I’ve been reading the novels that Lady Olivia recommended… and now I daresay I know more than you and Annabelle put together.” Lillian couldn’t help laughing. “Dear, I’m not certain that those novels are entirely accurate in their depiction of men, or of… of that.” Daisy frowned. “In what way are they not accurate?” “Well, there’s not really any sort of… you know, lavender mist and the swooning, and all the flowery speeches.” Daisy regarded her with sincere disgruntlement. “Not even a little swooning?” “For heaven’s sake, you wouldn’t want to swoon, or you might miss something.” “Yes, I would. I should like to be fully conscious for the beginning, and then I should like to swoon through the rest of it.” Lillian regarded her with startled amusement. “Why?” “Because it sounds dreadfully uncomfortable. Not to mention revolting.” “It’s not.” “Not what? Uncomfortable, or revolting?” “Neither,” Lillian said in a matter-of-fact tone, though she was struggling not to laugh. “Truly, Daisy. I would tell you if it were otherwise. It’s lovely. It really is.” Her younger sister contemplated that, and glanced at her skeptically. “If you say so.