I'll Take You There - Joyce Carol Oates

"I baptize thee in the name of ceaseless yearning, ceaseless seeking and ceaseless dissatisfaction. Amen!" (p. 9)

"In my pride I was hurt; I understood that I would be banished from a glamorous world in which in fact I took no interest; that I would be banished was a spur to my desire." (p. 40)

"I had decided that life is probably mostly a matter of memorized words in sequence; words, gestures, smiles and handshakes, in a certain sequence; life is not as the great philosophers taught in their loneliness, not a matter of essences pared back to theorems, propositions, syllogisms and conclusions, but instead a mtter of mouthing the correct word-formulae in the correct setting. Maybe it wasn't so serious, after all: life? Maybe it wasn't worth dying for." (p. 84)

"..he was still youngish, though with thinning hair and downturned eyes and the disfigured hand; unshaven, in an undershirt and soiled work trousers; elbows on the faded oilcloth, a bottle of whisky and a glass beside him; a Camel burning in his stained fingers; the overhead light casting crevice-like shadows downward onto his brooding yet somehow peaceful face. I saw that Where he is, no one can follow. And there was a kind of peace, too, in this realization." (p. 91)

"There can be no beauty here, therefore no hurt and no hope." (p. 99)

"... I did not yet understand that I was in love; I'd fallen in love with a man I did not know; with a man's mere voice; and that love is a kind of illness; not a radiant idea as I'd imagined but a physical condition, like grief." (p. 105)

"... never can we anticipate being older than we are, or wiser; if we're exhausted, it's impossible to anticipate being strong; as, in the grip of a dream, we rarely understand that we're dreaming, and will escape by the simplest of methods, opening our eyes." (p. 106)

"I learned that the male is all eyes; his sexuality is fueled through the eyes; he assesses through the eyes; judges swiftly and without mercy through the eyes." (p. 109)

"For whom we love helplessly we love, too, to betray: any connection is thrilling." (p. 120)

"My so-called personality had always been a costume I put on fumblingly, and removed with vague perplexed fingers; it shifted depending on circumstances, like unfastened cargo in the hold of a ship." (p. 129)

"Yes but I love you, nothing can shame me." (p. 157)

"Trying to imagine my life without Vernor Matheius at its center. My life without loving him.
A hole in the heart through which the bleak cold of the universe might whistle through." (p. 182)

"I came to believe that the unexamined life, the life that's led without continuous self-scrutiny, and a doubting of all inherited prejudice, bias, "faith", was madness. In our civilized lives we are surrounded by madness while believing ourselves enlightened." (p. 182)

"... waiting for Death for take another, as in a herd of beasts terrorized by predators there must be the single instinct-wish Take another! take another and not me! This was the secret of which adults would not speak; this was a secret known by children, and forgotten by adults; a secret of which the great philosophers would not speak because it is so stark, so simple; a secret lacking revelation." (p. 203)

"... to hurt oneself sometimes is a balm; to hurt onself sometimes is the only way of healing" (p. 235)

The Inferno - Dante Alighieri (trans. John Ciardi)

"Your soul is sunken in that cowardice/that bears down many men, turning their course/and resolution by imagined perils,/as his own shadow turns the frightened horse." (Canto II, p. 25)

"I AM THE WAY INTO THE CITY OF WOE.
I AM THE WAY TO A FORSAKEN PEOPLE.
I AM THE WAY INTO ETERNAL SORRY.
SACRED JUSTICE MOVED MY ARCHITECT.
I WAS RAISED HERE BY DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE,
PRIMORDIAL LOVE AND ULTIMATE INTELLECT." (Canto III, p. 30)

"'The double grief of a lost bliss/is to recall its happy hour in pain.'" (Canto V, p. 50)

"'Sullen were we in the air made sweet by the Sun;/in the glory of his shining our hearts poured/a bitter smoke...'" (Canto VII, p. 64)

"'O sun which clears all mists from troubled sight,/such joy attends your rising that I feel/as grateful to the dark as to the light." (Canto XI, p. 92)

"Those three sad spirits looked at one another/like men who hear the truth and understand." (Canto XVI, p. 129)

"'The man who lies asleep/will never waken fame, and his desire/and all his life drift past him like a dream,/and the traces of his memory fade from time/like smoke in air, or ripples on a stream." (Canto XXIV, p. 190)

"A man prepared is a man hurt by delay." (Canto XXVIII, p. 221)