#plague

It took Feyra some time to realise that she was not delirious: the citizens were wearing painted masks.From childhood she had heard the legend that the Venetians were half human, half beast.She knew that this could not be true, but in the swirling fog of this hellish city she almost believed it. The creatures seemed to stare at her down their warped noses from their blank and hollow eyes. And overlord of all was the winged lion - he was everywhere, watching from every plaque or pennant, ubiquitous and threatening. ↗

— Marina Fiorato

#bubonic-plague #historical-romance-fiction #medical-history #venice #architecture

You're staring," Lana said. "Yes. I am. I'm a teenage boy. Beautiful girls in wet underwear have a tendency to cause staring in teenage boys. ↗

— Michael Grant

#humor #lana #michael-grant #plague #sanjit

It is high time for the living to get tough, for toughness is indispensable in the struggle to safeguard and develop the life-force; this will not detract from their goodness, as long as they stand courageously by the truth. There is ground for hope in the fact that among millions of decent, hard-working people there are only a few plague-ridden individuals, who do untold harm by appealing to the dark, dangerous drives of the armored average man and mobilizing him for political murder. There is but one antidote to the average man's predisposition to plague: his own feelings for true life. The life force does not seek power but demands only to play its full and acknowledged part in human affairs. It manifests itself through love, work and knowledge. ↗

— Wilhelm Reich

#exploitation #knowledge #love #oppression #orgone

The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God's will ours. ↗

— Albert Camus

#the-plague #death

Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life. ↗

— Aldous Huxley

#life #plague #death

The point of civilization is to be civilized; the purpose of action is to perpetuate society, for only in society can philosophy truly take place. ↗

— Iain Pears

#black-plague #christians #clement-vi #dream-of-scipio #gaul

[Pope] Clement waved his hands in irritation as if to dismiss the very idea. "The world is crumbling into ruin. Armies are marching. Men and women are dying everywhere, in huge numbers. Fields are abandoned and towns deserted. The wrath of the Lord is upon us and He may be intending to destroy the whole of creation. People are without leaders and direction. They want to be given a reason for this, so they can be reassured, so they will return to their prayers and their obiediences. All this is going on, and you are concerned about the safety of two Jews? ↗

— Iain Pears

#civilization #decay #end-of-the-world #genocide #god-s-wrath

Sometimes I ask God what I did to deserve her love. I maintain my innocence, and of all the forms of God’s wrath from plagues, pestilence, and famine, her love is by far the cruelest.
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#famine #god #innocence #love #pestilence

Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside. ↗

— Toni Morrison

#emotional-plague #men #men

On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness. ↗

— Albert Camus

#existentialism #goodness #ignorance #the-plague #love