Historical Love Quotes

A hedgehog? And just how does a hedgehog make love?" he demanded. No, I thought. I won't. I will not. But I did. "Very carefully," I replied, giggling helplessly. So now we know just how old that one is, I thought.

If you can walk with the crowd and keep your virtue, or walk with Kings-nor lose the common touch; If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you; If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run- Yours is the earth and everything that's in it, And-which is more-you'll be a man my son.

Love's stories written in love's richest books. To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes.

It is an historical fact that you and I have a problem doing the right thing, for others and for ourselves. Yet, we deny it fiercely or wallow in shame, neither of which God wants for us.

If I die," he whispered in the dark, "dinna follow me. The bairns will need ye. Stay for them. I can wait.

How many times can a heart be shattered and still be pieced back together? How many times before the damage is irreparable?

Love is what remains when everything else is gone.

Grief's only ever as deep as the love it's replaced.

A woman has but two loves in life: the one who broke her heart and the one she spends the rest of her life with." - Carolyn Chase, former Broadcast Journalist and heroine Kate Theodore's mother

Love will find a way against time itself.

He shook his head, staring at her like a condemned man who beheld the face of his executioner. "Aline," he whispered, "Do you know what hell is?" "Yes." Her eyes overflowed. "Trying to exist with your heart living somewhere outside your body." "No. It's knowing that you have so little faith in my love, you would have condemned me to a lifetime of agony." His face contorted suddenly. "To something worse than death.

I know the truth now. You've figured out I'm falling in love with you and you're trying to make me stop by hurting me this way. Well it won't work. One way or another, I'm going to make you care about me. Yes, I am, unless your cold attitude kills me first. It's only fair, Connor. If I'm going to be miserable, by God, so are you. I am not a common wench and I will not be treated like one.

It had happened. Thucydides, his archrival, was a general. Glaucon, from his own tribe, was a general. And Pericles was no longer a general. He was just a citizen with one vote. And an idea

Creativity is closely associated with bipolar disorder. This condition is unique . Many famous historical figures and artists have had this. Yet they have led a full life and contributed so much to the society and world at large. See, you have a gift. People with bipolar disorder are very very sensitive. Much more than ordinary people. They are able to experience emotions in a very deep and intense way. It gives them a very different perspective of the world. It is not that they lose touch with reality. But the feelings of extreme intensity are manifested in creative things. They pour their emotions into either writing or whatever field they have chosen" (pg 181)

My love for you won't stop with my leaving. Come an evening over the years, when you step outside your door and hear the wind blowing through the cottonwoods, that'll be me, thinking of you, whispering your name, and loving you.

..he wanted her. And at another time, as another man, he would have her. Without hesitation. As lover. . . as more.

Someday, my love, you're going to understand just how much I care for you. You're my light, my warmth, my other half. I only feel alive when I'm with you. I love you." Caine

True love is like little roses, sweet, fragrant in small doses.

Before anything else I was a woman who was capable of passion and who had a great need and a great desire for love.

Looking over the Ethan's bowed head, amidst the tangled forest of Wilderness littered with the bodies of men dead and dying, Victor saw the serene image of his mother.  She smiled at her son, her unbound black hair blowing wildly in the breeze.  She reached a hand out towards him, and this time, he went with her.

Captain Vaselik was her only chance. She re-tied her kerchief, smoothed her clothes as much as possible and hoped she looked presentable enough as she and the children left for headquarters.

Show me a man that gets rich by being a politician, and I'll show you a crook.

Oh honey, someday a real man is going to make you see stars and you won't even be looking at the sky." Excerpt from Grace Willow's Last Minute Bride

The never-ending ache of love and sorrow.

Let him who knows who he is be no other but himself.

Home isn't a safe place where everything stays the same; it's a place where you are safe and loved despite nothing staying the same.

That evening Vaselik stood at his window watching Leah leave, her baby swaddled in the shaw tied over her shoulder. Leah looked like an apparition from another world.

Now she collapsed in a heap next to her boys. Although she was desperate for sleep, worries about getting more food kept her awake.

Then wake up my sweet,  wake up knowing that your future is to be happy, and that your heart will heal.

Don’t get any ideas,” Vaselik said as Leah left the room. “She’s a widowed Jew and my cook, so forget whatever you’re thinking.” “And you Ivan, what are you thinking?” asked Mikhail. “Less risk than a superior’s wife, no?

I would rather be a cripple and have your love for all of a single moment than to live as I am without ever having it.

I've fallen in love with you. I love you even now when you sit before me with the eyes of a wolf. So take pity upon the fool I have become. I forgot it was only a bargain between us.

Would there be extra payment for my services?” Leah tried not to appear too eager. “Is money all you Jews ever think about?” Vaselik asked. “It’s easy to be so offhand about money when you have it,” she replied coldly.

Knowing I should get into the habit of praying on my knees before bed, I shrugged and instead huddled under the bedcovers, the rose clasped in my hands close to my heart. The stem was very long, with all thorns removed, and an old Venetian saying came to mind: The longer the stem, the greater the love.

If I could,” he went on, “I would remain like this indefinitely—clasped by you, held inside you, a part of you—without moving at all. When we make love, I fight climax with everything I have. I don’t want to come; I do not want it to end. No matter how long I make it last, it isn’t nearly long enough. I am furious when I cannot hold back any longer. Why, Jess? If all I seek is the physical relief of natural lust, just as I would seek sleep or food, why would I deny myself?” She turned her head and caught his mouth with hers, kissing him desperately. “Tell me you understand,” he demanded, his lips moving beneath hers. “Tell me you feel it, too.” “I feel you,” she breathed, as intoxicated by his ardency as she was by the finest claret. “You have become everything to me.

The sounds grew louder and closer. At first they were muffles as if wrapped in cotton wool, then they became sharper as guns cracked, horses whinnied, doors mashed open, followed by the awful sounds of people screaming.

We’re having another meeting tonight, if you can come,” Yaakov said. “The soldiers are watching the village very closely,” she said, speaking in a whisper. “They are on the lookout for anyone who might be involved in organizing.” Arguments continued in all corners of the room. One man vehemently warned, “Anyone involved in advancing reforms or revolution against the government could face prison or a firing squad.

Suddenly in the line of solders, she saw him. The boy who had killed Morris. She knew he was Morris’ killer. There was no mistake.

Tonight must be our secret,“ she said to him. “Swear it.

Mister Cameron - I have read the unexpurgated Ovid, the love poems of Sappho, the Decameron in the original, and a great many texts in Greek and Latin histories that were not though fit for proper gentlemen to read, much less proper ladies. I know in precise detail what Caligula did to, and with, his sisters, and I can quote it to you in Latin or in my own translation if you wish. I am interested in historical truth, and truth in history is often unpleasant and distasteful to those of fine sensibility. I frankly doubt that you will produce anything to shock me.

Only someone watching him closely like Celena would have noticed his intense preoccupation, and that something in a split second had happened to him.  She wondered where he had gone when he should have been listening to the sermon, where his soul had gone went it had left his body.

A haunting memory flooded over Ethan when his own little sister had died. He had not thought of her in years! He glanced at the other chairs that sat empty around the table and wondered how different, or better his life would have been if she had lived. He tried to imagine her sitting there, but had trouble conjuring up her face.

Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see relationship between objects. Whether the objects love each other, need each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women - and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.

Here in the Settlement of the Pale, life was hard, but in times of real trouble, Leah thought it was always worse for the Jews.

I personally have a cunt. Sometimes it's 'flaps' or 'twat', but most of the time, it's my cunt. Cunt is a proper, old, historic, strong word. I like that my fire escape also doubles up as the most potent swearword in the English language. Yeah. That's how powerful it is, guys. If I tell you what I've got down there, old ladies and clerics might faint. I like how shocked people are when you say 'cunt'. It's like I have a nuclear bomb in my pants, or a tiger, or a gun. Compared to this the most powerful swearword men have got out of their privates is 'dick', which is frankly vanilla, and I believe you're allowed to use on, like, Blue Peter if something goes wrong. In a culture where nearly everything female is still seen as squeam-inducing, and/or weak - menstruation, menopause, just the sheer simple act of calling someone 'a girl' - I love that 'cunt' stands, on its own, as the supreme unvanquishable word. It has almost mystic resonance. It is a cunt - we all know it's a cunt - but we can't call it a cunt. We can't say the actual word. It's too powerful. Like Jews can never utter the Tetragrammaton - an must make do with 'Jehovah', instead.

A brief whiff of her mother had come through a cracked window that opened to a weed-infested courtyard. It was a fragrance that almost spoke to her, saying, 'Yes, it was an unjust end to the life of a good man.' A man who had accepted gratitude in the place of love, and who knew Magdalena's heart would always remain with Ales's father.

I don't care who he is. He needs to disappear." Ransom turned and called out the window. "For the love of G-d man. I have England's sweetheart bent over the desk and panting for me. Go away and come back tomorrow.

Her lips found his and a stab of exquisite desire shot through him. This is what he's been waiting for all this time. Not a stolen embrace. A gift, freely given. One that he would keep forever in some small part of his soul.

If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent Him. But all nature cries aloud that He does exist." (Voltaire)

He turned and smiled resolvedly at her.  He knew no one else would ever understand that for Arvellen, sex only had to do with friendship and of pleasing one another, and nothing at all to do with what she considered to be the silly confines of love or marriage.

I´ve always wanted him to love me the way I loved him. He did love me, I know he did. Just not the way I wanted him to. "And it´s so different for a lot of people I´ve known. One partner doesn´t love the other enough to stop drinking, or gambling, or running around with other women. One is the giver and one is the taker. The giver wishes the taker would stop." "But the taker never changes," Luke says, though he wonders if this is always the case. "Sometimes the giver has to let go, but sometimes you don´t. You can´t. I couldn´t give up on Jonathan. I seemed to be able to forgive him anything.

Our task as image-bearing, God-loving, Christ-shaped, Spirit-filled Christians, following Christ and shaping our world, is to announce redemption to a world that has discovered its fallenness, to announce healing to a world that has discovered its brokenness, to proclaim love and trust to a world that knows only exploitation, fear and suspicion...The gospel of Jesus points us and indeed urges us to be at the leading edge of the whole culture, articulating in story and music and art and philosophy and education and poetry and politics and theology and even--heaven help us--Biblical studies, a worldview that will mount the historically-rooted Christian challenge to both modernity and postmodernity, leading the way...with joy and humor and gentleness and good judgment and true wisdom. I believe if we face the question, "if not now, then when?" if we are grasped by this vision we may also hear the question, "if not us, then who?" And if the gospel of Jesus is not the key to this task, then what is?

Jane hid her trembling hands inside her muff. She wished there was a way to hide the fact that she was trembling all over. “I understood you from the first moment I saw you,” she admitted, her voice little more than a whisper. Mr Churchill looked up from her ribbons, and she was bowled over by his beautiful, soul-piercing, intelligent eyes. “And I knew from the moment you looked at me, that you understood me like no one has ever understood me before.” 

You’re my home, Susanna. My home, my heart, my dearest love. Wherever you are, that’s where I belong. Always.” - Victor Bramwell, Earl of Rycliff

You thought I was peculiar,” she said in a muffled voice. His mouth brushed the edge of her ear and settled against her neck. She felt that he was smiling. “Darling love… you are.

It is interesting to note that the "sexual revolution" was sometimes portrayed as a communal utopia, whereas in fact it was simply another stage in the historical rise of individualism. As the lovely word "household" suggests, the couple and the family would be the last bastion of primitive communism in liberal society. The sexual revolution was to destroy these intermediary communities, the last to separate the individual from the market. The destruction continues to this day.

Women. You'll interpret anything as love. You see a man wearing an idiotic expression, and you assume he's been struck by Cupid's arrow when in reality, he's digesting a bad turnip.

Thatched huts of mud sit humped in rows. Between the rows, a stagnant stream of sewage stews like thick soup bubbling in the clotted heat. Mosquitoes swarm. Garbage rots. Parvati gathers her sari about her and steps as lightly as she can down this gutter of filth. The boy stops outside one of the huts. Parvati and Sunil push aside the sacking that is over the doorway, stoop and step down onto a mud floor. Inside, there is no window, no light and no air. Only heat. Parvati puts her hand to her long elegant throat. Above her, one end of the roof is sagging as if about to collapse. ‘Bustee, very good,’ says the boy smiling.

Her whole face lights up when she smiles, Vaselik thought. She’s almost beautiful. When Leah entered the office and saw Vaselik standing there, her heart sklipped a beat like any foolish adolescent girl. Still he was her enemy...

We were arrogant and naive, thinking we knew what we felt then was love. Love can be a cheap emotion, lightly given, thought it didn´t seem so to me at the time. Looking back, I know we were only filling in the holes in our soles, the way the tide rushes sand to fill in the crevices of a rocky shore. We-or maybe it was just I-bandaged our needswith what we declared was love. But, eventually, the tide draws out what it has swept in.

She held her breath, when suddenly there was a pounding on the cellar door. No one moved, but the door broke open and Leah saw the outline of a man in a  long military coat, holding a sword reflecting the glow of the fires outside.

There isn’t going to be a ‘next lover,’” Grant said automatically, outraged by the idea. “I’m the only man she’s going to have.

We see the pain and the misery around the world and what the demonic kingdom and the devil and demons have done to mankind.

I am an ambassador in chains,” wrote Paul in Ephesians 6:20.

Lathis rattle against steel railings. Drenched half-naked men, some with torn shirts, jump up and down waving their fists. Some chant ‘Bande Mataram,’ others ‘Mazdur ki jai,’ whatever is their preference, the motherland or the brotherhood of workers. The hammer and sickle, red but limp, flaps like a half-dead fish against the trunk of a banyan tree. The sky cries monsoon tears; it has been crying all night.

There is not only one measure of beauty, Lanore. Everyone adores the red rose, and yet it is a common sort of beauty. You are like a golden rose, a rare bloom but no less lovely.

Midnight Omen Deja vu" - Because everyone should experience love in the Caribbean...at least once in a lifetime.

Don’t. Don’t play that game.” His brow pressed to hers. “When I heard you cry out . . . it was like a saber to the gut. I wanted to die.

Your love of glory must conquer your will to survive; or why fight at all? Why not be a smith, a brewer, a wool merchant? Why are you in the contest, if not to win, and if not to win, then to die?

His world closes in. The sky is endless no longer but pieced into squares of brick and bright cloths hanging down to dry. Underfoot, no longer stone but rubble, earth, the peelings and rotted scraps of the inedible. He smells the smoke of cooking fires, he hears men arguing and babies screaming like seagulls, he sees young women looking shyly down from high windows, exchanging glances. Now, he is no longer the watcher. Watched. Shouts echo in the dark between twisted walls and back alleys. A twisted smile in a doorway. A stranger’s voice. A stranger’s language.

Are you afraid?” he asked moving his chair directly in front of her. “Should I be?” she answered getting her courage back. She stood about to dart away, but Vaselik stopped her, took her hands and studied them intently.

You are correct in saying that desires often come from things we cannot easily gain - mine, being that of your love. By all accounts, I do wish I could steal it. But I am not that sort of man. I will wait. Forever and a day...I will wait.

Julia, hanging back, says, ‘How have you been, Stephen?’ I want to tell her everything. I want to find out what she’s been doing, what she plans to do but, at this fated moment, a vision of my stomach floats before me. It is a soggy marsh, green rushes growing round the edges, gas bubbles surfacing all over and bursting. The bubbling of the marsh is set to the music of creation, the percussive glottal stops of the Big Bang. I realize I have, at best, one complete sentence left in me. ‘Julia,’ I begin, composing in my head a deranged paean of love that I can never utter. ‘I regret that I am not myself today. Terry has poisoned me.’ ‘You should go home,’ she says.

She is an able negotiator and a strong ally." Pickering said, as his eyes caressed her lovely face.  He noticed both her arms were wrapped tightly around Victor's, and that she looked up at him with such commitment that it made his cynical view of love soften.  Reminding him bittersweetly of how he had felt once, a very long time ago.

Frank Churchill was waiting for her when she arrived. He had now been a convenient sixth with their party on multiple occasions, escorting Jane following the Campbells and Dixons, and it seemed so natural as he greeted them and slipped into place as they entered the hall. “Have a care, you are sparkling tonight,” he murmured under his breath. “Almost as if you had recently become engaged to the love of your life.” Jane did not dare look at him as she smiled. If she did, the entire world would know their secret.

Exercise care with what it is you do when you hold my heart in your hands. For it is my love that makes you special. When it is gone, you shall soon know it and you shall be special no more. Shane KP O'Neill - The Gates Of Babylon

Women's liberation is one thing, but the permeation of anti-male sentiment in post-modern popular culture - from our mocking sitcom plots to degrading commercial story lines - stands testament to the ignorance of society. Fair or not, as the lead gender that never requested such a role, the historical male reputation is quite balanced. For all of their perceived wrongs, over centuries they've moved entire civilizations forward, nurtured the human quest for discovery and industry, and led humankind from inconvenient darkness to convenient modernity. Navigating the chessboard that is human existence is quite a feat, yet one rarely acknowledged in modern academia or media. And yet for those monumental achievements, I love and admire the balanced creation that is man for all his strengths and weaknesses, his gifts and his curses. I would venture to say that most wise women do.

I want to propose a toast!" Taking a spoon he noisily tapped it against the crystal glass.  "Everyone!" He thundered, the large amount of whiskey he had consumed making him reckless.  "To Victor,  Ste. Genevieve's own inventor and my best friend, all the happiness in the world!"  The happy crowd shouted their approval.  "And to the ever, ever fair beauty Celena..." His voice cracking under the strain, and he wondered if he should stop now, before he embarrassed himself, before he made some horrible declaration.

Happy? Most of the time? Happiness is always a fleeting thing," he said, "It never rests upon anyone as a permanent state, though many of us persist in believing in the foolish idea that if this would just happen or that we would be happy for the rest of our lives. I know moments of happiness just as most other people do. Perhaps I have learned to find it in ways that would pass some people by. I feel the summer heat here at this moment and see the trees and the water and hear that invisible gull overhead. I feel the novelty of having company when I usually come here alone. And this moment brings me happiness.

Ancient moon priestesses were called virgins. ‘Virgin’ meant not married, not belong to a man - a woman who was ‘one-in-herself’. The very word derives from a Latin root meaning strength, force, skill; and was later applied to men: virle. Ishtar, Diana, Astarte, Isis were all all called virgin, which did not refer to sexual chasity, but sexual independence. And all great culture heroes of the past…, mythic or historic, were said to be born of virgin mothers: Marduk, Gilgamesh, Buddha, Osiris, Dionysus, Genghis Khan, Jesus - they were all affirmed as sons of the Great Mother, of the Original One, their worldly power deriving from her. When the Hebrews used the word, and in the original Aramaic, it meant ‘maiden’ or ‘young woman’, with no connotations to sexual chasity. But later Christian translators could not conceive of the ‘Virgin Mary’ as a woman of independent sexuality, needless to say; they distorted the meaning into sexually pure, chaste, never touched. When Joan of Arc, with her witch coven associations, was called La Pucelle - ‘the Maiden,’ ‘the Virgin’ - the word retained some of its original pagan sense of a strong and independent woman. The Moon Goddess was worshipped in orgiastic rites, being the divinity of matriarchal women free to take as many lovers as they choose. Women could ‘surrender’ themselves to the Goddess by making love to a stranger in her temple.

Aku berkata padanya saat kami berpisah, "Mau pergi sejauh setengah lingkar planet ini pun, pergilah, if you need to. Tapi jangan menghilang... give me a call." Dia bilang, "Kalau aku sudah pergi sejauh setengah lingkar planet ini, aku tinggal pergi sejauh setengah lingkar lagi. Biar kembali kepadamu.

Ala Moire’s voice whispered in Alastair Munro’s head. “Well done, Alastair. The young King’s heart is for good and God is pleased. In future times he will be known as the Peacemaker and will become the greatest of all the Dewar kings.” History would remember Dewar the Third’s reign as the greatest of the age, sixty years of peace and prosperity, of law and order, and most of all, of humility and love. His journey had begun. Robert Reid – White Light Red Fire

The blood of Jesus settled the score for us to be a champion in Him, to break the satanic powers of darkness, to stop the destroyer called the devil in his tracks, and for us to recover everything that he has stolen from us that has to do with our purpose and our destiny. Whatever the conqueror and the locust have eaten, God is the restorer of everything.

Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women - and abusrd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.

I love you," she murmured. The words ... it was as though an entire sun had exploded in his chest. He'd been ridiculous. His thrashing thoughts, his grand confusion and torment and helplessness -- it was only love, had always been love, he supposed. It was no precipice he stood at, or rather precipices have little meaning when one finally acknowledges that one has wings. Connor stepped off. "I love you, too." Such grave, inadequate words for what it was he felt.

And if he was kind and friendly and funny, and if he told you about places so beautiful that you wanted to go with him to see them, and if he listened to you talk like he actually cared about what you were saying? And if he tried to protect you when other people tried to tell you what to do, as if they owned you? And if he has the handsomest face you've ever seen, no matter if the skin has been damaged, because he's just lovely even so?

I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. And I thought if I was going to die I would die with you. Someone like you, young as I am, I saw so many dying near me in the last year. I didn’t feel scared. I certainly wasn’t brave just now. I thought to myself, We have this villa this grass, we should have lain down together, you in my arms, before we died. I wanted to touch that bone at your neck, collarbone, it’s like a small hard wing under your skin. I wanted to place my fingers against it. I’ve always liked flesh the colour of rivers and rocks or like the brown eye of a Susan, do you know what that flower is? Have you seen them? I am so tired, Kip, I want to sleep. I want to sleep under this tree, put my eye against your collarbone I just want to close my eyes without thinking of others, want to find the crook of a tree and climb into it and sleep. What a careful mind! To know which wire to cut. How did you know? You kept saying I don’t know I don’t know, but you did. Right? Don’t shake, you have to be a still bed for me, let me curl up as if you were a good grandfather I could hug, I love the word ‘curl,’ such a slow word, you can’t rush it...

Of course, we know that the world sees this wedding as a historical event. The first recorded marriage union between a Lunar and an Earthen since the second era. And maybe that is important. Maybe the love and compassion these two people have for each other is symbolic of hope for the future. Maybe this wedding signifies the possibility that someday our two races will not only learn to tolerate each other, but to love and appreciate each other as well. Or, maybe…” Kai’s eyes glinted. "… this relationship has absolutely nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with our shared human need to find someone who will care for us as much as we care for them. To find a partner who complements us and teaches us. Who makes us stronger. Who makes us want to be our best possible self.

Sociologists argue that in contemporary Western society the marketplace has become so dominant that the consumer model increasingly characterizes most relationships that historically were covenantal, including marriage. Today we stay connected to people only as long as they are meeting our particular needs at an acceptable cost to us. When we cease to make a profit - that is, when the relationship appears to require more love and affirmation from us than we are getting back - then we "cut our loses" and drop the relationship. This has also been called "commodification," a process by which social relationships are reduced to economic exchange relationships, and so the very idea of "covenant" is disappearing in our culture. Covenant is therefore a concept increasingly foreign to us, and yet the Bible says it is the essence of marriage.

Thomas Merton said it was actually dangerous to put the Scriptures in the hands of people whose inner self is not yet sufficiently awakened to encounter the Spirit, because they will try to use God for their own egocentric purposes. (This is why religion is so subject to corruption!) Now, if we are going to talk about conversion and penance, let me apply that to the two major groups that have occupied Western Christianity—Catholics and Protestants. Neither one has really let the Word of God guide their lives. Catholics need to be converted to giving the Scriptures some actual authority in their lives. Luther wasn’t wrong when he said that most Catholics did not read the Bible. Most Catholics are still not that interested in the Bible. (Historically they did not have the printing press, nor could most people read, so you can’t blame them entirely.) I have been a priest for 42 years now, and I would sadly say that most Catholics would rather hear quotes from saints, Popes, and bishops, the current news, or funny stories, if they are to pay attention. If I quote strongly from the Sermon on the Mount, they are almost throwaway lines. I can see Catholics glaze over because they have never read the New Testament, much less studied it, or been guided by it. I am very sad to have to admit this. It is the Achilles heel of much of the Catholic world, priests included. (The only good thing about it is that they never fight you like Protestants do about Scripture. They are easily duped, and the hierarchy has been able to take advantage of this.) If Catholics need to be converted, Protestants need to do penance. Their shout of “sola Scriptura” (only Scripture) has left them at the mercy of their own cultures, their own limited education, their own prejudices, and their own selective reading of some texts while avoiding others. Partly as a result, slavery, racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, and homophobia have lasted authoritatively into our time—by people who claim to love Jesus! I think they need to do penance for what they have often done with the Bible! They largely interpreted the Bible in a very individualistic and otherworldly way. It was “an evacuation plan for the next world” to use Brian McLaren’s phrase—and just for their group. Most of Evangelical Protestantism has no cosmic message, no social message, and little sense of social justice or care for the outsider. Both Catholics and Protestants (Orthodox too!) found a way to do our own thing while posturing friendship with Jesus.

From Good Friday in AD 33 through the following Sabbath day, the apostles were whimpering, broken fugitives. After Resurrection Sunday, they were lions who revolutionized the world. What caused this astonishing change? After watching Jesus undeniably die, the apostles saw, touched, and ate with the risen Lord, not once, but many times for over forty days. The fact of the Resurrection demonstrated to them (and demonstrates to us) that Jesus is God; and if he is God, his teaching is true. Only the realization of that could have been worth more to the apostles than their lives.

Sermons frequently refer to the apostles of Christ as poor, uneducated tradesmen. But three of the Twelve, Matthew, John, and Peter, wrote some of the world’s all-time best-selling literature. The apostles were more than just literate; Jesus called them scribes “who [had] been trained for the kingdom of heaven . . . like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old” (Matt 13:52). It would be surprising if the disciples ignored this and failed to take notes during Jesus’ ministry.

In the context of the English language, there were many more important words than “in.” There were fancy words, historic words, words that meant life or death. There were multi-syllabic tongue-twisters that required a sort out before speaking, and mission-critical pivotals that started wars or ended wars…and even poetic nonsensicals that were like a symphony as they left the lips. Generally speaking, “in” did not play with the big boys. In fact, it barely had much of a definition at all, and, in the course of its working life, was usually nothing but a bridge, a conduit for the heavy lifters in any given sentence. There was, however, one context in which that humble little two-letter, one-syllable jobbie was a BFD. Love. The difference between someone “loving” somebody versus being “in love” was a curb to the Grand Canyon. The head of a pin to the entire Midwest. An exhale to a hurricane.

Real love isn't ambivalent. I'd swear that's a line from my favorite best-selling paperback novel, "In Love with the Night Mysterious", except I don't think you've ever read it. Well, you ought to, instead of spending the rest of your life, trying to get through "Democracy in America." It's about this white woman whose daddy owns a plantation in the Deep South, in the years before the Civil War. And her name is Margaret, and she's in love with her daddy's number-one slave, and his name is Thaddeus. And she's married, but her white slave-owner husband has AIDS: Antebellum Insufficiently-Developed Sex-organs. And so, there's a lot of hot stuff going down, when Margaret and Thaddeus can catch a spare torrid ten under the cotton-picking moon. And then of course the Yankees come, and they set the slaves free. And the slaves string up old daddy and so on, historical fiction. Somewhere in there I recall, Margaret and Thaddeus find the time to discuss the nature of love. Her face is reflecting the flames of the burning plantation, you know the way white people do, and his black face is dark in the night and she says to him, "Thaddeus, real love isn't ever ambivalent.

Glanced up and caught Ammu's gaze. Centuries telescoped into one evanescent moment. History was wrong-footed, caught off guard. Sloughed off like an old snakeskin. Its marks , its scars its wouns from old wars and the walking backwards days all fell away. In its abscence it left an aura, a palpable shimmering that was as plain as water in a river or the sun in the sky. As plain to feel the heat on a hot day, or the tug of a fish on a taut line. So obvious that no-one noticed. In that brief moment, Velutha looked up and saw things that he hadn't seen before. Things that had been out of bounds so far, obscured by histor's blinkers. ...This knowing slid into him cleanly, like the sharp edge of a knife. Cold and hot at once. It only took a moment. Ammu saw that he saw. She looked away. He did too. History's fiends returned to claim them. To rewrap them in its old scarred pelt and drag them back to where they really lived. Where the Love Laws lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.

Sometimes I fantasize about getting my hands on my library records. . . my recurring bookworm dream is to peruse my personal library history like it's a historical document. My bookshelves show me the books I've bought or been given. . . But my library books come into my house and go out again, leaving behind only memories and a jotted line in a journal (if I'm lucky). I long for a list that captures these ephemeral reads - all the books I've borrowed in a lifetime of reading, from last week's armful spanning back to when I was a seven-year-old kid with my first library card. I don't need many details - just the titles and dates would be fine - but oh, how I'd love to see them. Those records preserve what my memory has not. I remember the highlights of my grade-school checkouts, but much is lost to time. How I'd love to see the complete list of what I chose to read in second grade, or sixth, or tenth.

The Anonymous Creed We believe in one God, and many gods, and the possibility of none, And also that the existence of the almighty is largely irrelevant, Because regardless of who is maker of heaven an death, It is our duty to care for all of creation, both visible and invisible. We believe in one fundamental truth: That all people, regardless of what they worship, who they love, and what they think Have a right to exist, and a right to be heard. We strive to make faith consubstantial with reason and compassion, Through which all good things are made. We believe in the goodness of humankind (with a few notable exceptions), The worth of listening to our friends and understanding our enemies, The power of a single voice in a silent room, And the practicality of cloaks and other assorted historical outerwear. We do not all believe in one holy, catholic, and apostolic church But are nonetheless grateful that it brought us together. We strive to remember that high school will not last forever And look forward to graduation day And the life of that world to come. Amen.

Outside and inside, life and soul, appear as parallels in “case history” and “soul history.” A case history is a biography of historical events in which one took part: family, school, work, illness, war, love. The soul history often neglects entirely some or many of these events, and spontaneously invents fictions and “inscapes” without major outer correlations. The biography of the soul concerns experience. It seems not to follow the one-way direction of the flow of time, and it is reported best by emotions, dreams, and fantasies … The experiences arising from major dreams, crises, and insights give definition to the personality. They too have “names” and “dates” like the outer events of case history; they are like boundary stones, which mark out one’s own individual ground. These marks can be less denied than can the outer facts of life, for nationality, marriage, religion, occupation, and even one’s own name can all be altered … Case history reports on the achievements and failures of life with the world of facts. But the soul has neither achieved nor failed in the same way … The soul imagines and plays – and play is not chronicled by report. What remains of the years of our childhood play that could be set down in a case history? … Where a case history presents a sequence of facts leading to diagnosis, soul history shows rather a concentric helter-skelter pointing always beyond itself … We cannot get a soul history through a case history.

They rode for a while in silence, a tiny island in the smoky stream of marching men. Then Lee said slowly, in a strange, soft, slow tone of voice, "Soldiering has one great trap." Longstreet turned to see his face. Lee was riding slowly ahead, without expression. He spoke in that same slow voice. "To be a good soldier you must love the army. But to be a good officer you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love. This is...a very hard thing to do. No other profession requires it. That is one reason why there are so very few good officers. Although there are many good men." Lee rarely lectured. Longstreet sensed a message beyond it. He waited. Lee said, "We don't fear our own deaths, you and I." He smiled slightly, then glanced away. "We protect ourselves out of military necessity, not do not protect yourself enough and must give thought to it. I need you. But the point is, we are afraid to die. We are prepared for our own deaths, and for the deaths of comrades. We learn that at the Point. But I have seen this happen: we are not prepared for as many deaths as we have to face, inevitably as the war goes on. There comes a time..." He paused. He had been gazing straight ahead, away from Longstreet. Now, black-eyed, he turned back, glanced once quickly into Longstreet's eyes, then looked away. "We are never prepared for so many to die. So you understand? No one is. We expect some chosen few. We expect an occasional empty chair, a toast to dear departed comrades. Victory celebrations for most of us, a hallowed death for a few. But the war goes on. And the men die. The price gets ever higher. Some officers...can pay no longer. We are prepared to lose some of us." He paused again. "But never ALL of us. Surely not all of us. But...that is the trap. You can hold nothing back when you attack. You must commit yourself totally. And yet ,if they all die, a man must ask himself, will it have been worth it?

You sometimes hear people say, with a certain pride in their clerical resistance to the myth, that the nineteenth century really ended not in 1900 but in 1914. But there are different ways of measuring an epoch. 1914 has obvious qualifications; but if you wanted to defend the neater, more mythical date, you could do very well. In 1900 Nietzsche died; Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams; 1900 was the date of Husserl Logic, and of Russell's Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. With an exquisite sense of timing Planck published his quantum hypothesis in the very last days of the century, December 1900. Thus, within a few months, were published works which transformed or transvalued spirituality, the relation of language to knowing, and the very locus of human uncertainty, henceforth to be thought of not as an imperfection of the human apparatus but part of the nature of things, a condition of what we may know. 1900, like 1400 and 1600 and 1000, has the look of a year that ends a saeculum. The mood of fin de siècle is confronted by a harsh historical finis saeculi. There is something satisfying about it, some confirmation of the rightness of the patterns we impose. But as Focillon observed, the anxiety reflected by the fin de siècle is perpetual, and people don't wait for centuries to end before they express it. Any date can be justified on some calculation or other. And of course we have it now, the sense of an ending. It has not diminished, and is as endemic to what we call modernism as apocalyptic utopianism is to political revolution. When we live in the mood of end-dominated crisis, certain now-familiar patterns of assumption become evident. Yeats will help me to illustrate them. For Yeats, an age would end in 1927; the year passed without apocalypse, as end-years do; but this is hardly material. 'When I was writing A Vision,' he said, 'I had constantly the word "terror" impressed upon me, and once the old Stoic prophecy of earthquake, fire and flood at the end of an age, but this I did not take literally.' Yeats is certainly an apocalyptic poet, but he does not take it literally, and this, I think, is characteristic of the attitude not only of modern poets but of the modern literary public to the apocalyptic elements. All the same, like us, he believed them in some fashion, and associated apocalypse with war. At the turning point of time he filled his poems with images of decadence, and praised war because he saw in it, ignorantly we may think, the means of renewal. 'The danger is that there will be no war.... Love war because of its horror, that belief may be changed, civilization renewed.' He saw his time as a time of transition, the last moment before a new annunciation, a new gyre. There was horror to come: 'thunder of feet, tumult of images.' But out of a desolate reality would come renewal. In short, we can find in Yeats all the elements of the apocalyptic paradigm that concern us.