Howard gave her good writing advice: "Your yarns never have any real conflict. Your girl comes from a good home; everybody loves her; everything's pleasant.  She is happy, and, if she wants something,  she gets it.... What about you, the unwanted child.... Why don't you write about girls with problems like that?" Price responded, "I can't.  It hurts too bad"

@MoleI'm glad you do. As soon as I read that paragraph I just had to share it.

I received an answer from a story in the Paterikon: “An Elder sees a demon dragging a Christian by a chain. And the Elder says: 'You wretched creature, this is God's image, and he is baptized, how do you dare keep him in chains?'.

And the demon replies: Father, are you blind? Don't you see that I am only dragging the chain, and he is holding on to it.”

We are not interested in proving that humankind didn't evolve from apes. An Orthodox priest gave a wonderful answer to this question: “People who believe they are descended from apes are descended from apes, and people who believe they are made by God are made by God!”

“Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive
hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling
class, in fact within the whole range of society assumes such a
violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling
class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the
class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at
an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the
bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the
proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois
ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of
comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.”

"You are getting better at this, but it's not good enough. This looks like a tree, but it is an average, ordinary, everyday, boring tree. Breathe life into it. Make it bend—trees are flexible, so they don't snap. Scar it, give it a twisted branch—perfect trees don't exist. Nothing is perfect. Flaws are interesting. Be the tree."

Now they became obsessed with the idea that they had fallen into bad luck. They took heroin against the idea. The measured quantities that had distinguished their previous habits as models of noble restraint went out the fucking window. Now they were horsing into it. And the aura of bad luck was at once everywhere. It was around them like a nervous village. The stone hills spoke out the rumour of the bad luck. The wind blew the rumour in swirls about their feet. Bad luck, bad luck—the idea entertained itself, fattened, came to fruition. They took cocaine in breakneck quantities against the idea of the bad luck. They were hammering into the Powers, the John Jameson, it was breakfast from the bottle and elevenses off the mirror. The child would as well be raised by the cats that sat lazily in what April sun troubled itself to come across the rooftops of Berehaven. The build was a disaster from the get-go. A young fella from Sneem, as broad as he was long, broke his leg on the first morning of construction. Word of the accident was around the fishwives of Berehaven like a fast fucking fire. Up on the wind-blown site, there was a sense that morning of fatalism, unhingedness, morbid introspection. Day two some fucking eejit with a kango hammer nearly took the marriage prospects off himself. Day five a thirty-two-year-old man from Glengarriff had a mini-stroke while he was mixing bags of sand and gravel. The builder Murphy was by now having trouble keeping his numbers up, and he was depressed and drinking heavily the length of the slow evenings in the West End Bar. Maurice drove into Cork city on Thursday mornings to meet the first Dublin train on which was ferried their week’s supply of heroin. The tenth morning of the build—a Friday—they were aware that the week’s supply had been badly cut and were raging about it, and just then Charlie Redmond phoned from Spain to say a speedboat containing a half-tonne of their Moroccan hashish had been taken by the Guardia Civil just as it came into La Línea de la Concepción. Bad luck, bad luck. The boat had been spotted at Ceuta, it seemed, but what were you going to do? Charlie Redmond was affecting a note of blithe indifference which Maurice Hearne was in no fucking form for. Putting foundations in the rocks of the hills above Berehaven was dreadful work. The rocks screamed and whined dangerously as they were drilled into. The children of the rocks cried out. We are making marks here that we have no right to make. We’ll answer for it. Bad luck, bad luck. He was starting to wonder if Cynthia had a thing for the builder Murphy, who was a big handsome uncouth motherfucker, but with dainty touches for the ladies, and his black depression perhaps lent a poetical air. Maurice drove alone above the site and looked down on the construction and masturbated sorrowfully about the girl who worked in the West End Bar in the afternoons. With Cynthia he mixed the cut heroin with cocaine to make speedballs, and they shot them up and fucked each other and then they’d have a fight after it. Bad luck, bad luck. The guards were driving past the site daily with interested little smiles. Another labourer spat blood copiously the first morning of the third week as the trench of foundations edged towards the fairy mound and he was never seen again. Half the builders on site by now were Spanish fishermen beached off the trawlers and good for nothing as they were lacerated by the weather. It had turned into a wet April and it was so cold in the sea-damp and Maurice Hearne was hearing old voices in the night. But they stuck at it. There was such a thing as bullheadedness. The houses started to break out across the hill—a crescent of nine houses to be named Ard na Croí. A boatload of cocaine worth two million pounds was taken a few miles down the coast, and Maurice was brought in and questioned. It was a Wednesday night. That he knew nothing was soon evident. As he left the stationhouse, the detective said—you’ll want an early start in the morning, Moss, get in and meet that Dublin train. He wanted to leave the place again but was rooted to it now. Fucking Ireland. Its smiling fiends. Its speaking rocks. Its haunted fields. Its sea memory. Its wildness and strife. Its haunt of melancholy. The way that it closes in.

She by the river sat, and sitting there,
She wept, and made it deeper by a tear.

“Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

A woman who was doing the "Forgivness Seminar" with us (for us its very important to learn how to forgive) had a serious problem with her husband who was--well, he was a man. Do you know what that means--a man? It means 'dangerous!'

And as a parenthesis: many times women ask me about the meaning of the Epistle that is read during the marriage ceremony, where it says that a wife must fear her husband. And I always tell them: this is because men are dangerous! If a man hits you... it's better to fear him and respect him and not provoke him. A man is dangerous from all points of view. But a man once told me: "Women are dangerous, too!" And I replied: "Yes! Have you ever seen a woman, when her husband yells at her, that she continues to read the newspaper or watch TV? You haven't? Well, that is the difference!"

It's not that he thinks Spanel is dangerous, or crazy, of that he pictures her naked (because he's never seen her naked), or that he's only ever met a few female butchers and that all of them have been inscrutable, impossible to decipher.

There's something admirable in her artificial indifference.

There's something about her he'd like to break.

His father is person of integrity, that's why he went crazy.

But the pain, he intuits, is the only thing that keeps him breathing.

Without the sadness, he has nothing left.

His demand must have surprised then terrified her. She obeyed him; she always did as she was told.

On the other hand, a society which, under whatever influence of philosophic or religious or political change, fails to preserve full human responsibility among its members will be one in which the arts will languish among ordinary workmen and will become the accomplishment of specially gifted or rebellious individuals. Apart from the production of these extraordinary and eccentric persons, the only arts which will flourish will be the arts of engineering.

She squeezed his hand, and raised it, and turned it palm upward. “So soft,” she said. She caressed his palm with her thumb, which moved slowly and rhythmically in small circles. “That's the only thing I don't like about the men here. Their hands are so rough.”

He was trembling. With his free hand he grasped the armrest of the sofa and held it tightly.

“What do they call you?” Francine asked softly. “Is it William?”

“Will,” Andrews said.

“I'll call you William,” she said. “It's more like you, I think.” She smiled slowly at him. “You're very young, I think.”

He removed his hand from the smooth caress of her fingers. “I am twenty-three.”

She came closer to him, sliding across the sofa; the rustle of her stiff smooth dress sounded like soft cloth tearing. Her shoulder lightly pressed against his shoulder, and she breathed gently, evenly.

“Don't be angry,” she said. “I'm glad you're young. I want you to be young. All of the men here are old and hard. I want you to be soft, while you can be. . . . When will you go with Miller and the others?”

“Three or four days,” Andrews said. “But we will be back within the month. And then—”

Francine shook her head, though she continued smiling. “Yes, you'll be back; but you won't be the same. You'll not be so young; you will become like the others.”

Andrews looked at her confusedly, and in his confusion cried: “I will only become myself!”

She continued as if he had not interrupted. “The wind and sun will harden your face; your hands will no longer be soft.”