I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty.
Jean GenetRead
If a seperate personal Paradise exists for each of us mine must irreparably be planted with trees of words which the wind silvers like poplars, by people who see their confiscated justice given back, and by birds that even in the midst of the truth of death insist on singing in Greek and saying, eros, eros, eros.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the personal nature of paradise, shaped by language, justice, and enduring love in the face of mortality.
Odysseas Elytis expresses the idea that each individual's paradise is unique and deeply influenced by personal expressions such as language and the quest for justice. He uses imagery of trees, wind, and birds to symbolize the cultivation of thoughts and emotions, and ultimately highlights the resilience of love ('eros') that persists even amidst the harsh realities of life, such as death.
In practice
In a speech about personal growth, you might say, 'As Odysseas Elytis puts it, our separate paradises are filled with the trees of our own words.'
I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty.
Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
Prayer and sacrifice can touch souls better than words.
Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
God has cast our confessed sins into the depths of the sea, and He's even put a 'No Fishing' sign over the spot.
There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.
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