But slowly, slowly! --Issa.
Concerning the Gods, there are those who deny the very existence of the Godhead; others say that it exists, but neither bestirs nor concerns itself nor has forethought for anything. A third party attribute to it existence and forethought, but only for great and heavenly matters, not for anything that is on earth. A fourth party admit things on earth as well as in heaven, but only in general, and not with respect to each individual. A fifth, of whom were Ulysses and Socrates, are those that cry:--"I move not without Thy knowledge!" --Epictetus.
The love interest and climax would come when a man and a lady, both strangers, got to talking together on the train going back east.
"Well," said Mrs. Croot, for it was she, "what did you think of the Canyon?"
"Some cave," replied her escort.
"What a funny way to put it!" replied Mrs. Croot. "And now play me something." --Ring Lardner ("How to Write Short Stories").
God instructs the heart, not by ideas but by pains and contradictions. --De Caussa
de.
"Papa!" shrieked Kitty, and shut his mouth with her hands.
"Well, I won't..." he said. "I'm very, very pleased... Oh, what a fool I am..."
He embraced Kitty, kissed her face, her hand, her face again, and made the sign of the cross over her.
And there came over Levin a new feeling of love for this man, till then so little known to him, when he saw how slowly and tenderly Kitty kissed his muscular hand. --"Anna Karenina."
"Sir, we ought to teach the people that they are doing wrong in worshipping the images and pictures in the temple."
Ramakrishna: "That's the way with you Calcutta people: you want to teach and preach. You want to give millions when you are beggars yourselves... Do you think God does not know that he is being worshipped in the images and pictures? If a worshipper should make a mistake, do you not think God will know his intent?" --"The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna."
"Don't you want to join us?" I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was already almost deserted. "No, I don't," I said.--Kafka.
The happiness of being with people. --Kakfa.
St. Francis de Sales' prayer: "Yes, Father! Yes, and always, Yes!"
Zui-Gan called out to himself every day, "Master."
Then he answered himself, "Yes, sir."
And then he added, "Become sober."
Again he answered, "Yes, sir."
"And after that," he continued, "do not be deceived by others."
"Yes, sir; yes, sir," he replied. --Mu-Mon-Kwan.
The lettering on the beaverboard being as small as it was, this last entry appeared well in the upper fifth of its column, and Zooey could have gone on reading for another five minutes or so, staying in the same column, without having to bend his knees. He didn't choose to. He turned around, not abruptly, and walked over and sat down at his brother Seymour's desk--pulling out the little straight chair as though it were something he did every day. He placed his cigar on the right-hand edge of the desk, bum-ing end out, leaned forward on his elbows, and covered his face with his hands.
Behind him and at his left, two curtained windows, with their blinds half drawn, faced into a court--an unpicturesque brick-and-concrete valley through which cleaning women and grocery boys passed grayly at all hours of the day. The room itself was what might be called the third master bedroom of the apartment, and was, by more or less traditional Manhattan apartment-house standards, both unsunny and un-large. The two eldest Glass boys, Seymour and Buddy, had moved into it in 1929, at the respective ages of twelve and ten, and had vacated it when they were twenty-three and twenty-one. Most of the furniture belonged to a maplewood "set": two day beds, a night table, two boyishly small, knee-cramping desks, two chiffoniers, two semi-easy chairs. Three domestic Oriental scatter rugs, extremely worn, were on the floor. The rest, with very little exaggeration, was books. Meant-to-be-picked-up books. Permanently-left-behind books. Uncertain-what-to-do-with books. But books, books. Tall cases lined three walls of the room, filled to and beyond capacity. The overflow had been piled in stacks on the floor. There was little space left for walking, and none whatever for pacing. A stranger with a flair for cocktail-party descriptive prose might have commented that the room, at a quick glance, looked as if it had once been tenanted by two struggling twelve-year-old lawyers or researchists. And, in fact, unless one chose to make a fairly thoughtful survey of the reading matter extant, there were few, if any, certain indications that the former occupants had both reached voting age within the predominantly juvenile dimensions of the room. True, there was a phone--the controversial private phone--on Buddy's desk. And there were a number of cigarette burns on both desks. But other, more emphatic signs of adulthood--stud or cuff-button boxes, wall pictures, the telling odds and ends that collect on chiffonier tops--had been removed from the room in 1940, when the two young men "branched out" and took an apartment of their own.
With his face in his hands and his handkerchief headgear drooping low over his brow, Zooey sat at Seymour's old desk, inert, but not asleep, for a good twenty minutes. Then, almost in one movement, he removed the support for his face, picked up his cigar, stowed it in his mouth, opened the left-hand bottom drawer of the desk, and took out, using both hands, a seven-or eight-inch-thick stack of what appeared to be--and were--shirt cardboards. He placed the stack before him on the desk and began to turn the cards over, two or three at a time. His hand stayed only once, really, and then quite briefly.
The cardboard that he stopped at had been written on in February, 1938. The handwriting, in blue-lead pencil, was his brother Seymour's:
My twenty-first birthday. Presents, presents, presents. Zooey and the baby, as usual, shopped lower Broadway. They gave me a fine supply of itching powder and a box of three stink bombs. I'm to drop the bombs in the elevator at Columbia or "someplace very crowded" as soon as I get a good chance.
Several acts of vaudeville tonight for my entertainment. Les and Bessie did a lovely soft-shoe on sand swiped by Boo Boo from the urn in the lobby. When they were finished, B. and Boo Boo did a pretty funny imitation of them. Les nearly in tears. The baby sang "Abdul Abulbul Amir." Z. did the Will Mahoney exit Les taught him, ran smack into the bookcase, and was furious. The twins did B.'s and my old Buck & Bubbles imitation. But to perfection. Marvellous. In the middle of it, the doorman called up on the housephone and asked if anybody was dancing up there. A Mr. Seligman, on the fourth--
There Zooey quit reading. He gave the stack of cardboards a solid-sounding double tap on the desk surface, as one taps a deck of cards, then dropped the stack back into the bottom drawer and closed the drawer.