The collection / 11 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01Undated

Not all the magic of earth is benevolent.

Alden Bell / quote

02Undated

The abundance of small things, it'll bury you.

Alden Bell / quote

03Undated

...and she's thinking of rage, like an ember or a burning acid swallowing up her knotted viscera. Blindness like the kind that leads men to perpetrate horrors, animal drunkenness, the jungles of the mind.

Alden Bell / quote

04Undated

It never meant anything, Moses says. Not to the god above it and not to the earth below it. It never did. Not even when they first did it. But it’s the doin it that counts. It’s something. You draw imaginary lines. That’s what you do.The Vestal looks at him kindly, a smile on her lips that seems affectionate--even maybe admiring.Then what do you do with the lines? she asks.And Moses looks at her straight and true. He says:Then you pick one side or the other and you stand there.

Alden Bell / quote

05Undated

...a noisy parade of memories that frustrate her because of the way they play themselves out. These memories-it feels like she's back there in the moment, like she has the moment to do over and make different choices than she made. But she can't, because they're just memories and they're set down permanent as if they were chiseled in marble, and so she just has to watch herself do the same things over and over and it's a condemnation if it's anything.

Alden Bell / quote

06Undated

Honey, she says, honest ain’t the half of what I’m not.

Alden Bell / quote

07Undated

Dying is Easy , its Living that's hard

Alden Bell / quote

08Undated

Stories that pander to your every readerly desire and whim are like overly loyal dogs that live for the simple glow of your approval. I'm a cat person. I like a little aloofness in my pets and my writing.

Alden Bell / quote

09Undated

To stop. To cease, just for a moment. To turn your back on the world, to close your eyes - to see the nothing that is not rather than the nothing that is everywhere around you. To just be quiet in your mind for a little minute. There are paradises even yet on the abandoned plains of the earth -- and they are not filled with fecund flowering Edens but rather just with sweet unerring silences.

Alden Bell / quote

10Undated

It's one of the happy things about a world gone so wrong: your personal freakishness don't stand out so much.

Alden Bell / quote

11Undated

Words have the power to make things true if they're said right.

Alden Bell / quote