the-phooey

The guilt of not showing up when I should have has led me to sense offense when none was intended, to assume resentment lingered in them the way shame did in me.

And all that burgeoning physicality is held within yourself as a sort of secret, even as it is also the actual surface that you present to the world, so that you’re left absurdly exposed, unsure whether the world knows everything about you or nothing, because you have no way of knowing whether these experiences that you’re having are universal or entirely specific.

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.

"She was grieving for the party's sake," Susannah's brother whispered in her ear, "not for her own sake, nor for ours." Later on, harking back to that scene, it seemed to Susannah that the mystery of their parent's bond with the party would forever remain inaccessible to her and her brother. It was a bond stronger than the ties of blood. And by the same token, stronger than the knot of marriage. "In the highlands," she repeated after him. Atrocities must have been committed up there. And that peculiar bond must have been forged there too. The nature of such a bond was presumably still little understood because it was too new. Unlike religious allegiances, it was in competition with the ties of clan and family because it too was a tie of blood, but with a difference. It wasn't based on inner blood; the blood in your veins, identical to the blood of your family going back a thousand years, according to genetics. But on the other kind, on outer blood. That's to say on the blood of others. Blood they had drunkenly spilled in the name of doctrine.

We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.