The Man Who Was Thursday

Will you swear that! If you will take upon your­self this aw­ful ab­neg­a­tion if you will con­sent to bur­den your soul with a vow that you should never make and a know­ledge you should never dream about, I will prom­ise you in re­turn—”

that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem

lawlessness of art and the art of lawlessness

The first was the old fear that any mir­acle might hap­pen, the second the more hope­less mod­ern fear that no mir­acle can ever hap­pen.

“Listen to me,” cried Syme with ex­traordin­ary em­phasis. “Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from be­hind, and it looks bru­tal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Can­not you see that everything is stoop­ing and hid­ing a face? If we could only get round in front—”

An old man in poor health, like my rival, could not be ex­pec­ted to be so im­press­ively feeble as a young actor in the prime of life.

Fight the thing that you fear.

Through all this or­deal his root hor­ror had been isol­a­tion, and there are no words to ex­press the abyss between isol­a­tion and hav­ing one ally. It may be con­ceded to the math­em­aticians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thou­sand times one. That is why, in spite of a hun­dred dis­ad­vant­ages, the world will al­ways re­turn to mono­gamy.

You think that it is pos­sible to pull down the Pres­id­ent. I know that it is im­possible, and I am go­ing to try it

He had a new im­pulse to tear out the secret of this dan­cing, jump­ing and pur­su­ing para­lytic; and at the en­trance of the court as it opened upon the Cir­cus he turned, stick in hand, to face his pur­suer.