#east

We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is. ↗

— John Steinbeck

#evil

She leaned forward, her gaze so intense that Helen wanted to look away. “And I love him more for it. Do you hear me? He was a good man when he went away to the Colonies. He came back an extraordinary man. So many think that bravery is a single act of valor in a field of battle—no forethought, no contemplation of the consequences. An act over in a second or a minute or two at most. What my brother has done, is doing now, is to live with his burden for years. He knows that he will spend the rest of his life with it. And he soldiers on.” She sat back in her chair, her gaze still locked with Helen’s. “That to my mind is what real bravery is.” -Sophia to Helen about Alistair. ↗

— Elizabeth Hoyt

#elizabeth-hoyt #helen #sophia #to-beguile-a-beast #life

You've got to stop thinking everyone's problems can be solved by falling in love. ↗

— Melissa de la Cruz

#ingrid-beauchamp #melissa-de-la-cruz #witches-of-east-end #love

We ate away, reminiscing about our victories over the enemies from different streets and villages and competing with each other in casting curses. A few golden butterflies and dragonflies were fluttering around us. The afternoon air was warm and clean, and the town below us seemed like a green harbor full of white sails. ↗

— Ha Jin

#departure #great-feasting #communism

All you have to do is revise your point of view. Instead of trying to achieve perfection, simply relax and enjoy human imperfectability. With that perspective you achieve the ultimate godhead. You see man as infinite possibility always in the process of becoming. You see finally that man, in emulating the creative process, is nothing less than God. ↗

— Robert H. Rimmer

#unconditional-love #love

Unfortunately, the reality was that, for political reasons or whatever, there was a need to enforce antidiscrimination laws, or at least there was a perceived need to do that. ↗

— Clarence Thomas

#laws #least #need #perceived #political

Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction. ↗

— Dylan Thomas

#appear #bad #certainty #conviction #harsh

The White House used to belong to the American people. At least that's what I learned from history books and from covering every president starting with John F. Kennedy. ↗

— Helen Thomas

#american people #belong #books #covering #every

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#around #beast #begin #bits #calculating

Our dreams are firsthand creations, rather than residues of waking life. We have the capacity for infinite creativity; at least while dreaming, we partake of the power of the Spirit, the infinite Godhead that creates the cosmos. ↗

— Jackie Gleason

#cosmos #creates #creations #creativity #dreaming