“And so I learned what solitude really was. It was raw material - awesome, malleable,older than men or worlds or water. And it was merciless - for it let a man become precisely what he alone made of himself.”
“It was so good to see him in there, yet so funny to find him so much like me, and so tiny. "Nice kingdom you got here," I added, laughing again. "But it didn't feel quite right without you. Or should I say, without me?"This time he laughed too, and though there were no bubbles or sound I could feel his delight rise up through the water: which made me laugh even harder: which made him do the same.--Page 84, "The Brothers K”
“The mind will say this forever. But I mostly fish rivers these dayas. In so doing, movement becomes stasis, flux is the constant, and everything flows around, through, and beyond me, escaping ungrasped, unnamed, and unscathed. The river's clean escape does not prevent belief in its reality. On the contrary, there is nothing I love more than the feel of a wholeness sliding toward, around, and past me while I stand like an idiot savant in its midst, focusing on tiny, idiot-savantic bits of what is so beautiful to me, and so close, yet so wondrously ungraspable.”
“I felt free to like all three of these men now, because I’d realized I didn’t have to become them.”
“But I finally concluded that it is an inalienable right of lovers everywhere to become temporarily worthless to the world, it may even be their duty.”
“We hear nothing so clearly as what comes out of silence. ”
“I'd trapped myself in a script.... But to be scripted at all is to be prepackaged, programmed, pinned to a page. Only the unwritten can truly live a life. So who I was, what I was, had to be unwritten.”