Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.
Norman MailerRead
As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never know where our prayers are likely to go nor from whom the answers will come. When we think we are nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that our understanding of faith and divine intervention is complex and uncertain.
Norman Mailer's quote reflects on the unpredictable nature of prayer and the spiritual realm. It suggests that while we may feel close to divine guidance, we could also inadvertently be aligned with negative influences. This challenges the assumption that our intentions and spiritual pursuits are straightforward and underscores the complexities of faith, morality, and the human experience.
In practice
This quote can be used in a philosophical discussion about the nature of good and evil.
Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.
I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.
There's nothing glorious about being a professional. . . . Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day.
The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
Over-certified adjectives are the mark of most best-seller writing
At bottom, I mean profoundly at bottom, the FBI has nothing to do with Communism, it has nothing to do with catching criminals, it has nothing to do with the Mafia, the syndicate, it has nothing to do with trust-busting, it has nothing to do with interstate commerce, it has nothing to do with anything but serving as a church for the mediocre. A high church for the true mediocre.
For a government to declare a vice to be a crime, and to punish it as such, is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it would be to declare truth to be falsehood, or falsehood truth.
The foundations of our society and our government rest so much on the teachings of the Bible that it would be difficult to support them if faith in these teachings would cease to be practically universal in our country.
They laughed. Things were funny. They weren't afraid to care. There was no sense to life, to the structure of things.
The most violent appetites in all creatures are lust and hunger; the first is a perpetual call upon them to propagate their kind, the latter to preserve themselves.
Most go to prison not on account of their irreducible uniqueness as people but because they are part of a marginalized sector of the population who never had a chance, who were slated for it early on.
The true nature of anything is what it becomes at its highest.
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