“I am not an angel,′ I asserted; ‘and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me - for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate.”
“Turn him into stars and form a constellation in his image. His face will make the heavens so beautiful that the world will fall in love with the night and forget about the garish sun.”
“I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”
“Me miserable! which way shall I flie
Infinite wrauth, and infinite despaire?
Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threatning to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav’n.”
“Love in your mind produces love in your life. This is the meaning of heaven. Fear in your mind produces fear in your life. This is the meaning of hell.”
“Everyone has an idea of heaven, as do most religions, and they should all be respected. The version represented here is only a guess, a wish, in some ways, that my uncle and others like him - people who felt unimportant here on Earth- realize, finally, how much they mattered and how they were loved.”
“People think of Heaven as a paradise garden, a place where they can float on clouds and laze in rivers and mountains. But scenery without solace is meaningless.”
“There are five people you meet in heaven. Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth.”
“You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch the perfect speed. And it isn’t flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn’t have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.”
“‘A burden lies heavily upon me.’ He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘You see, I’ve learned that our city will be burned with fire from heaven. I’m afraid we are all doomed . . . even you, my sweet children, unless I can find some way of escape, but I haven’t found any way.’”
“Above all, pay attention to your own hearts with their lusts, for they are ‘deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.’ Set your faces with flint-like resolve since you have all power in heaven and earth on your side.”
“The scriptural picture of heaven is therefore just as symbolical as the picture which our desire, unaided, invents for itself; heaven is not really full of jewelry any more than it is really the beauty of Nature, or a fine piece of music.”
“Dance and game are frivolous, unimportant down here; for “down here” is not their natural place. Here, they are a moment’s rest from the life we were placed here to live. But in this world everything is upside down. That which, if it could be prolonged here, would be a truancy, is likest that which in a better country is the End of ends. Joy is the serious business of Heaven.”
“Now, if we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already in us, but not yet attached to the true object, and will even appear as the rival of that object.”
“The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.”
“Heaven is what you mix all the days of your life, but you call it dreams. You have one chance to buy your Heaven with all the intents and ethics of your life. That is why everyone considers Heaven such a lovely place. Because it is dreams, special dreams, in which you exist. What you have to do is live up to them.”
“And there came out stars in the heavens, Like a … of heaven he fell upon me. I bore him but he was too heavy for me. He bore a net but I was not able to bear it.”
“The bodies of irrational animals are bent toward the ground, whereas man was made to walk erect with his eyes on heaven, as though to remind him to keep his thoughts on things above.”
“To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!”
“We make Hell real; we stoke its fires.
And in its flames our hope expires.
Heaven, too, is merely our creation.
We can grant ourselves our own salvation.
All that’s required is imagination.”
“Sweet wandering bird that singest on thy way,
Or mournest yet the time for ever past,
Watching night come and spring receding fast,
Day’s bliss behind thee and the seasons gay,—
If thou my griefs against thine own couldst weigh,
Thou couldst not guess how long my sorrows last;
Yet thou mightst hide thee from the wintry blast
Within my breast, and thus my pains allay.
Yet may not all thy woes be named with mine,
Since she whom thou dost mourn may live, yet live,
But death and heaven still hold my spirit’s bride;
And all those long past days of sad decline
With all the joys remembered years can give
Still bid me ask ‘Sweet bird! with me abide!‘”
“For socialism is not merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth.”
“Reading in bed can be heaven, assuming you can get just the right amount of light on the page and aren’t prone to spilling your coffee or cognac on the sheets. ”
“You say I have no power? Perhaps you speak truly... But — you say that dreams have no power here? Tell me, Lucifer Morningstar... Ask yourselves, all of you... What power would hell have if those imprisoned were not able to dream of heaven?”
“Amy had said that she hoped there was lime Jell-O in heaven because she couldn’t go an eternity without it. We’d laughed so hard green gelatin sprayed out of our mouths.”
“They say of some temporary suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.”
“Would to Heaven we had never approached them at all, but had run back at top speed out of that blasphemous tunnel with the greasily smooth floors and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they had superseded-run back, before we had seen what we did see, and before our minds were burned with something which will never let us breathe easily again!”
“That is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say, “we have never lived anywhere except in heaven,’ and the Lost, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.”
“The evil genius of darkness presided at its birth, it came forth under the veil of mystery, its true features being carefully concealed, and every deceptive art has been and is practicing to have this spurious brat received as the genuine offspring of heaven-born liberty.”
“Eternity felt very big and very slow, especially when I couldn’t share it with the cat. The only thing that helped was the chain saw that Waldemar Buck used to carve up the afternoon. It wailed over the rooftops, and I imagined that with each wail a little piece of eternity fell from heaven.”
″‘Couldn’t Great-Grandma have used the names again, once the children were dead?’ asked Inez, being practical.
‘And how would brother and sister be told apart in Heaven, may I ask? And the bad luck! Consider the bad luck!‘”
“One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven.”
“I’m going to die, he thought, just because of this Thing that has never helped us at all, something that’s just a lump of stuff, and now I’m going to die and go to the Heavens.”
“I wonder if old Torrit is right about what happens when you die. It seems a bit severe to have to die to find out. I’ve looked at the sky every night for years, and I’ve never seen any nomes up there...”
“Everybody is waiting for the end to come, but what if it already passed us by? What if the final joke of Judgment Day was that it had already come and gone and we were none the wiser? Apocalypse arrives quietly; the chosen are herded off to heaven, and the rest of us, the ones who failed the test, just keep on going, oblivious. Dead already, wandering around long after the gods have stopped keeping score, still optimistic about the future.”
“Religion class, first period Monday morning, is the place to try to pull the wool over the eyes of Sister Gregory. (She kept her male saint’s name although the custom went out years ago. She probably thinks it will get he into heaven. I don’t think she realizes that feminism has hit religion and the female saints in heaven are probably also in revolt.) ‘Would you like to explain yourself, Josephine?’ ”
“Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing, Beloved from pole to pole! To Mary Queen the praise be given! She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven, That slid into my soul.”
“Then accumulated knowledge is not wisdom? A Great heavens, no! If knowledge were wisdom, the achievements of science would not have been converted into implements of destruction.”
“Love heals. Heals and liberates. I use the word love, not meaning sentimentality, but a condition so strong that it may be that which holds the stars in their heavenly positions and that which causes the blood to flow orderly in our veins.”
“Why do I not have an immortal soul! […] I would give all my three hundred years of life for only one day as a human being if, afterward, I should be allowed to live in the heavenly world
“Love heals. Heals and liberates. I use the word love, not meaning sentimentality, but a condition so strong that it may be that which holds the stars in their heavenly positions and that which causes the blood to flow orderly in our veins. This book has been written to examine some of the ways love heals and helps a person to climb impossible heights and rise from immeasurable depths.”
“They walked the whole day over the meadows, fields, and stony places; and when it rained the little sister said: ‘Heaven and our hearts are weeping together.’ In the evening they came to a large forest, and they were so weary with sorrow and hunger and the long walk, that they lay down in the hollow tree and fell asleep.”
“The masses are always wrong...Wisdom is doing everything the crowd does not do. All you do is reverse the totality of their learning and you have the heaven they’re looking for.”
“In An Apple Tree
In September, when the apples were red,
To Belinda I said,
‘Would you like to go away
To Heaven, or stay
Here in this orchard full of trees
All your life?’
And she said, ‘If you please
I’ll stay here-where I know,
And the flowers grow.’ ”
“Practicality is a difficult thing to find; it does not drop down from heaven. And for the last two hundred years we have been divorced from all practical life. Ideas, if you like, are fermenting,”