“The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.”
“I’ve been talking to you for a long time, but today was the first time you could hear it, and all those other times weren’t a waste either. Like little cracks in the wall, one at a time but woven together, they prepared you for today. You have to prepare the soil if you want it to embrace the seed.”
“The war was undoubtedly the most profound and inescapable influence on writers in the 1920s. [...] Social, political, and aesthetic developments were percolating throughout the first part of the 20th century. In Paris, this influences coalesced in an environment that encouraged rather than stifled their growth. ”
“Your comfort zone is a place where you keep yourself in a self-illusion and nothing can grow there but your potentiality can grow only when you can think and grow out of that zone.”
“Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develope itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.”
“We are entering a world in which we can rely less and less upon the state, the corporation, or family or friends to help and protect us. It is a globalized, harshly competitive environment. We must learn to develop ourselves.”
“He had not been in El Paso for years, and they had developed it considerably since then, he’d heard, along the lines of sin and salvation. They had churches and a Republican or two and a smart of banks and a symphony orchestra and five railroads and a lumberyard and the makings of a library.”
“The in-love experience does not focus on our own growth or on the growth and development of the other person. Rather, it gives us the sense that we have arrived and that we do not need further growth.”
“Brother and sister were products of the highest strata of humanity’s evolution. In them the primitive had long ago been swept aside, been submerged by mechanization, been swamped by scientific development, been nullified by the standardized pattern of the white man’s way of life.”
“Hear me, Pip! I adopted her, to be loved. I bred her and educated her, to be loved. I developed her into what she is, that she might be loved. Love her!”