The Temple Of My Familiar Quotes
"What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears."
"The worse thing was, I’d never known these particular people before! Never."
"For most people, as you know, remember nothing of other lifetimes, and no matter how old they get they never remember any better."
"Everything was changing, it is true, but still many of the old ways were everywhere on view."
"The rest of the time they lived on grease, sorghum syrup, and biscuits."
"You could wear it hanging or propped up on your head or pulled back by bits of string or flower stems, any way you could."
"For what the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears."
"The priests of our village lacked any sign of joy."
"He played for his dead mother and for the father he’d hardly known; the longing for both came out of the guitar as wails and sobs."
"It was a relief. And at times, too, he simply thought, something that money, enough to keep you going for a while without worrying, permitted you to do."
"But underneath the armor of her voice and her skin there is this gentle person."
"Imagine where and to whom so many of them are born. They sleep to avoid the shock of the cruel thing that’s been done to them and to avoid the inevitable feeling of utter helplessness."
"And I felt that was because we were where life was. For even in our frailty, we laughed."
"There are few things more confusing to people than the process of regaining or attaining health."
"None of us ever becomes all that was in us to be."
"My father died of a heart attack when I was two years old."
"He fully believed that if the stones were not kept, his people would remain dispersed forever."
"We were packed as if we were sardines, for this two-month-long journey."
"In the dream memory we are very small people, all of us."
"I realize that in our smallness we were like perpetual children to them."
"It was a lovely feeling to hold a little cousin under one’s chin."
"There was such safety around their trees."
"Lulu and Fadpa would say, instead, that they saw a hundred pretty women locked in a room to which the man in front of them, alone, had the key and at least half an evening of a man’s favorite kind of peace."
"‘Ah, even fucking hurt sometime,’ she said, when I told her how I felt, ‘but if it gets real good, you soon get over it.’"
"The greatest miracle they performed was to get their freedom from the harem at the rather ripe old ages of ninety-six and a hundred and three, which was granted them by the great-granddaughter of their old master."
"‘God, it’s like rubber,’ she said, making a face and spitting into the rag."
"It does no good to be angry. I will just drive my nice little car until they take it away from me."
"It wasn’t beyond Lissie. She wanted more fucking and more babies, too, and the more I said no, the hotter and madder she got."
"Life is very different when you have a good friend. I’ve seen people without special friends, close friends. Other men, especially. For some reason men don’t often make and keep friends."
"Miracles, Lissie says she learned, as Lulu, are the direct result of concentration."
"We could have moved, but it was pleasant and felt like family being at Rafe’s."
"For once they fear it, the one who tells it doesn’t stand a chance."
"For weeks she was content. She liked the walk to the market. It permitted her to meet her neighbors."
"This housewifely contact with the early morning was preparing her to take up once again the daily morning ritual of running."
"He’d forgotten the party they’d thrown the night before. Yes indeed, even the peanut butter was gone."
"‘The cart,’ he said, ‘reminds me of little old ladies with funny-colored hair, net scarves, and dowager’s humps.’"
"‘I just don’t see myself pushing one,’ said Suwelo. ‘I’m sorry.’"
"‘I wonder if you see yourself eating?’ And she lifted the mound of dough and dropped it into the blue step-on garbage can at her feet."
"‘I was raised to be a certain way,’ he began to say very often in conversations that were not about the little murder at all."
"I was just out walking with my cousin T., who makes me laugh so much I wish we were not cousins."
"I have been avoiding marriage for many years now."
"The rest are adept at fitting in, of being perfectly capable of tolerating, even condoning, and, dare I say it, of elevating to an exalted state the condition of boredom."
"How T. and I blushed with pleasure last night at the ballet, a savage, wild thing that shocked Mother so much Father had to pretend to be shocked as well."
"The modern world recognized what it was losing."
"It does no good to cry, I suppose, yet there are times when that is just the way I feel."
"Men who pay something, anything, are considered the good men."
"I couldn’t stand the grayness, the heaviness of the architecture, the absence of wild trees."
"Woman merely carries the seed, the child is totally the fruit of its father."
"According to her, at Orestes’ trial for the murder of his mother, woman merely carries the seed, the child is totally the fruit of its father."
"Learning from one's elders does not permit pessimism. Your day is always easier than theirs."
"Learning from one's elders gives courage by osmosis."
"Forgiveness is the true foundation of health and happiness."
"Without forgiveness, there is no forgetfulness of evil."
"Violence does not solve anything; it only prolongs itself."
"HELPED are those who love others unsplit off from their faults; to them will be given clarity of vision."
"HELPED are those who love the Earth, their mother, and who willingly suffer that she may not die."
"HELPED are those who strive to give up their anger; their reward will be that in any confrontation their first thoughts will never be of violence or of war."
"HELPED are those who love and actively support the diversity of life; they shall be secure in their differentness."
"HELPED are those who lose their fear of death; theirs is the power to envision the future in a blade of grass."
"It is against blockage between ourselves and others—those who are alive and those who are dead—that we must work."
"For really, Suwelo, if our parents are not present in us, consciously present, there is much, very much about ourselves we can never know."
"Walls remain. They grow moss. They are difficult barriers to cross, to get to others, to get to closed-down parts of ourselves."
"It is a sin to behave as if a person whose body you use is a being without substance."
"By the time you get this, I will be somewhere and someone else."
"In blocking off what hurts us, we think we are walling ourselves off from pain. But in the long run the wall, which prevents growth, hurts us more than the pain."
"The human body has been recognized as toxic, by the animals, for a very long time."
"Gold, the white man worships gold because it is the sun he has lost."
"It would have been unthinkable for the lion who had the thorn removed from his paw by Androcles to hurt the friend who removed it."
"When a musician is working, he or she is already making love."
"It’s too late to teach people what they need to know by the methods that are used in colleges."
"Who needs more of the kind of people colleges produce? They’re all consumers, really."
"What all of us are trying to learn is what you already know."
"Trees are alive. They have a purpose separate from becoming houseboats, firewood, and decks."
"I read and read but I’m such a slow reader! I will never catch up!"
"Relax. This is serious work, it’s true; but, you know, most serious work can be fun."
"What’s truly regrettable is how, as a musician, you tend to lose people as you go along."
"The heart just goes out to the man. Besides, I can’t see him."