I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say - feel for all you're worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live.
Henry JamesRead
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I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say - feel for all you're worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live.
But you know it's hard to tell When you're in the spell if it's wrong or if it's real But you're bound to lose If you let the blues get you scared to feel
To know and feel all this and not have the words to express it makes a human a grave of his own thoughts.
Freedom and love go together. Love is not a reaction. If I love you because you love me, that is mere trade, a thing to be bought in the market; it is not love. To love is not to ask anything in return, not even to feel that you are giving something- and it is only such love that can know freedom.
I feel that books, just like people, have a destiny. Some invite sorrow, others joy, some both.
Walking along past the store windows, into which she peers with her usual eagerness, her usual sense that maybe, today, she will discover behind them something that will truly be worth seeing, she feels as if her feet are not on cement at all but on ice. The blade of the skate floats, she knows, on a thin film of water, which it melts by pressure and which freezes behind it. This is the freedom of the present tense, this sliding edge.
This was something she would keep hidden within herself, maybe in place of the knot of pain and anger she had been carrying under her breastbone...a security blanket, an ace up her sleeve. She might never use it, but she would always feel its presence like a swelling secret stone, and that way when she let go of the rage, she would not feel nearly as empty.
I feel as if one would only discover on one's death-bed what one ought to have lived for, and realise too late that one's life has been wasted. Any passionate and courageous life seems good in itself, yet one feels that some element of delusion is involved in giving so much passion to any humanly attainable object. And so irony creeps into the very springs of one's being.
If I extend an empty hand and in retrieving it and finding it still empty, I feel disappointment, that is foolishness; yet if I extend a hand which is full and yet find no one to receive it, then that is hopelessness.
I feel despised there, for having so little money; also for once having had so much. I never actually had it, of course. Father had it, and then Richard. But money was imputed to me, the same way crimes are imputed to those who've simply been present at them.
We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author.
Sometimes we feel the loss of a prejudice as a loss of vigor.
Anyway I feel myself a bit on the edge on the art world, but I don't mind, I'm just pursuing my work in a very excited way. And there isn't really a mainstream anymore, is there?
When I go to the clinic next and sit with a tube in my arm and watch the poison go in, I'm in an attitude of abject passivity. It doesn't feel like fighting at all; it just feels like submitting.
But, you know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don't really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man.
"Welcome, Prince," said Aslan. "Do you feel yourself sufficient to take up the Kingship of Narnia?" _x000D_ "I - I don't think I do, Sir," said Caspian. "I'm only a kid." _x000D_ "Good," said Aslan. "If you had felt yourself sufficient, it would have been a proof that you were not."
He yearned not to feel... He wished he could rip out his heart, his innards, everything that was screaming inside him.
Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.
I soon discovered that if you keep your mouth shut, people are apt to believe you know everything, and they begin to feel freer and freer to tell you anything, anxious to show that they know something, too.
But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem: they might point to the catkins hanging from the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the rain descending on black earth in early spring. --- And we, who always think of happiness rising, would feel the emotion that almost baffles us when a happy thing falls.
Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere he can be cured and made human again.
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