The Island of the World
Michael D. O'Brien
Top 10 Best Quotes
“...life without coffee is not really life.”
“Life without coffee is not really life.”
“In this world are many people who do not master their bodies. Such people say that no one can tell them what to do, not even God, and they think that in this way they have no master. In the end they become slaves to anything.”
“Love is the soul of the world, though its body bleeds, and we must learn to bleed with it. Love is also the seed and milk and the fruit of the world, though we can partake of it in greed or reverence. We are born, we eat, and learn, and die. We leave a tracery of messages in the lives of others, a little shifting of the soil, a stone moved from here to there, a word uttered, a song, a poem left behind. I was here, each of these declare. I was here.”
“We came to know that love is the soul of the world, though its body bleeds, and we must learn to bleed with it.”
“Automobiles are unreliable and dangerous slaves. They frequently revolt and kill their masters. I hate them.”
“The mountains are intimations of transcendence, which he is now free to pursue, and the walking writes messages in every cell of his body, telling him that he is not locked inside a cement box, nor in a water drum, but is moving forward.”
“[T]he reason why Shakespeare and Pushkin were great writers was because from the time when they were boys they stood like policemen over their thoughts and didn't allow one small insincerity to creep in.”
“Words are gold, split and shared as coinage, small pebbles, emblems offered back and forth-given, received; given, received-expanding the vocabulary of the soul.”
“The poet who sees himself as a hero or a prophet, or a priest of the socio-political forces to which he is loyal, which he believes are the historical necessities of his times, too easily becomes a puppet. He has no external measure with which to assess reality. Whether he submits to the forces or rejects them, he becomes a parody of himself, and then without knowing it submits his gifts to the demons of his era. He loses his place in the continuity of time. He becomes dependent on social affirmation and the drug of exalted feelings common to all revolutionaries. He destroys, even as he thinks he creates.”
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Book Keywords:
revolution, writing, pride, pushkin, shakespeare, cars, transcendence, mountains, automobiles, nature
