#parable

The vibrations he felt in his sleep had nothing to do with his soul easing out of his body as he dreamily thought; they came solely from the weight and motion of the freight train rolling north to deliver fuel, furniture and other items having no relevance to Elijah’s life or his dreaming. On the metal rail his arm itched like a nose with a feeling that something bad was about to happen. In another life the sound of the train would have been reminiscent of certain songs by Muddy Waters or even Bruce Springsteen but not in this one. In this life the sound stabbed viciously against the night exactly like a human being demonstrating flawless disrespect for the life of another human being. --from short story ELIJAH’S SKIN ↗

— Aberjhani

#parables #philosophical-inquiry #short-fiction #short-story #dreams

The naked man had lost hope now; he would never be able to return to the earth's surface;he would never leave the bottom of this shaft, and he would go mad there drinking blood and eating human flesh, without ever being able to die. Up there, against the sky, there were good angels with ropes, and bad angels with grenades and rifles, and a big old man with a white beard who waved his arms but could not save him. ↗

— Italo Calvino

#parable #religion-is-evil #love

I follow suit, said the lion, vacating his coat of arms and movie logos; and the eagle said, Get me off this flag. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#animals #humans #morals #parable #movies

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. ↗

— Cormac McCarthy

#brooks #creation #destruction #earth #environment

Contention is inseparable from creating knowledge. It is not contention we should try to avoid, but discourses that attempt to suppress contention. ↗

— Joyce Appleby

#avoid #contention #creating #discourses #inseparable

The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes. ↗

— Charles Baudelaire

#being #enjoys #himself #incomparable #others

Because it's not only that a child is inseparable from the family in which he lives, but that the lives of families are determined by the community in which they live and the cultural tradition from which they come. ↗

— Bernice Weissbourd

#child #come #community #cultural #determined

Women must pay for everything. They do get more glory than men for comparable feats, but, they also get more notoriety when they crash. ↗

— Amelia Earhart

#comparable #crash #everything #feats #get

I have learned as much in the last three years as in any other comparable period of my life, but with an added realisation of how little over a half century of study one has in fact managed to learn of the whole range of economic policy issues. ↗

— James Meade

#any #century #comparable #economic #economic policy

Without a Mayaguez, or something comparable that we don't see in the immediate future, there is probably no one thing the President can do to himself to turn this situation around. ↗

— Robert Teeter

#comparable #future #himself #immediate #immediate future