He said that when we finally did get the farm paid for we could tell everybody to go to hell. That was what he lived for, to own his farm without having to say please or thank you to a living soul.

The English philosopher and geometer, Keith Critchlow, brings his own light to the same point: "The human mind takes apart with its analytic habits of reasoning but the human heart puts things together because it loves them . . ."18

We live by the assumption that what's good for us is good for the world. And this is based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what's good for us.

You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out—perhaps a little at a time." "And how long is that going to take?" "I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps." "That could be a long time." "I will tell you a further mystery," he said "It may take longer.

And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led—make of that what you will.

So we stood there, not knowing either how to stay or how to go, and felt the weight of that failure.

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

I believe in God, God. God, I believe in God.

I can stand on my own feet; I don't need any man's mahogany desk to prop me up

Women do have an affinity for evil, for believing that no woman is to be trusted, but that some men are too innocent to protect themselves.

ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crises with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.