“It was probably what had made him rob the bank. Back home the idea probably never would have occurred to him. Over here different standards seemed to apply. One behaved— differently. As if nobody was looking, as if foreigners—Americans at least—could get away with anything they pleased. Virtually all tourists felt this. They had been released from the strictures placed on them inside their own societies. Their personalities seemed to change. Some merely became boorish and loud. Some committed acts formerly unthinkable.”
The Dangerous Edge by Robert Daley
“It is the avowal of the unschooled man, that he finds a quality in him that is negligent of expense, of health, of life, of danger, of hatred, of reproach, and knows that his will is higher and more excellent than all actual and all possible antagonists.”
Heroism, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Then someone with Catholic tendencies said, “His soul will burn forever, you know,” and I couldn’t let such a nasty thought sit there without spitting on it, so I said, “I think you should find whoever does your thinking for you and ask them to update.”
A Fraction of the Whole, Stevie Toltz
“You know who else used to get a rubbishing? Socrates. That’s right. Socrates. That’s right. This one time he was out philosophizing with some mates, and this bloke who didn’t like what he was saying came right up to him and kicked him in the arse so hard he fell to the ground. Socrates looked up at the man and smiled at him benignly. He was taking it with amazing calm. An onlooker said, ‘Why don’t you do something, or say something?’ and Socrates said back, ‘If you were kicked by a mule, would you reprimand him?’”
A Fraction of the Whole, Stevie Toltz
“I think that’s the real loss of innocence: the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your own potential.”
A Fraction of the Whole, Stevie Toltz
“Am I changing? Is a man’s character changeable? Imagine an immortal. Revolting to think he might be making the same old booboos over the centuries. To think of the immortal on his 700,552nd birthday still touching the plate even when someone has told him it’s hot—surely we have deep capacity for change but our 80 years doesn’t give us ample opportunity. You have to be a fast learner. You have to cram infinity into a handful of lousy decades.”
A Fraction of the Whole, Stevie Toltz
“I discovered more about the properties of loneliness, how it is like the slow squeeze of testicles by a hand that has just been in a refrigerator.”
A Fraction of the Whole, Stevie Toltz
“You experience life alone, you can be as intimate with another as much as you like, but there has to be always a part of you and your existence that is incommunicable; you die alone, the experience is yours alone, you might have a dozen spectators who love you, but your isolation, from birth to death, is never fully penetrated. What if death is the same aloneness, though, for eternity? An incommunicable, cruel, and infinite loneliness. We don’t know what death is. Maybe it’s that.”
A Fraction of the Whole, Stevie Toltz
“I concluded that my father had tried to erase any image of his brother so he might forget him. The futility of the attempt was obvious; when you put in that much effort to forget someone, the effort itself becomes a memory. Then you have to forget the forgetting, and that too is memorable.”
A Fraction of the Whole, Stevie Toltz
“She’d been strong for a skinny-armed, thin-shanked woman, the way she toted that rucksack. It would sit upright on the ground, sagging at the top, and she would bend at the waist to hoist it. Her wrists would poke out thin and white from the sleeves of her too-big anorak, her fringe would hang down and her jaw would come forward a little way. A sound would come from her lungs as she held the strap of the rucksack and took its weight and swung it onto her back. One time he had offered to help and she shook her head. She would notice him watching her. Sometimes she would smile and sometimes she would not, but she would never look him in the eyes until the rucksack was up on her back and the straps were tight. More than once in Afghanistan Kellas had caught himself thinking about the sound, the exhalation with voice, which came from her involuntarily as the weight pressed on her. He thought of the air in her breast, and the rush of it in her larynx, and the bones containing them, and the flesh around them. He’d recognised the things of which this tiny sound was the centre: a fascination. A fascination was what came about when a single life wasn’t enough to contain the presence of someone else inside him. He needed to be running two or three lives at once. Not even words had made the fascination, just the flex of her limbs and the tiny sound as she took the strain of her pack. Just those things had crossed into him, and faint as the chances were, he wanted to follow them back to their source.”
James Meek, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent