The darkness. Goddamn the darkness. It seemed to Garraty they had been — Stephen King

"Dont forget that youre a mental being, with a humongous trillion gigawatt hard-drive at your disposal. Most of you have been running it like crazy for four years, moaning about all the books youve had to read, the papers youve had to write, and the tests youve had to take. Yet thanks to that hard-drive and about a thousand cups of coffee, you made it. Just...let me put it this way. I can find out where you live. I have my resources. And if I show up at your house ten years from now and find nothing in your living room but the Readers Digest, nothing on your bedroom nighttable but the newest Dan Brown novel, and nothing in your bathroom but Jokes for the John, Ill chase you down to the end of your driveway and back, screaming "Where are your books? You graduated college ten years ago, so how come there are no damn books in your house? Why are you living on the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese?" I sound like Im joking about this, but Im not. Youve got a brain under the cap youre wearing. Take care of the damned thing. Try to remember theres more to life than Vin Diesel and Tom Cruise. It wouldnt kill you to go to a movie once a month that has subtitles on the bottom of the screen. You can read them, you went to college, right?"

"You can go through your whole life telling yourself that life is logical, life is prosaic, life is sane. Above all, sane. And I think it is. Ive had a lot of time to think about that."

"You think Okay, I get it, Im prepared for the worst, but you hold out that small hope, see, and thats what fucks you up. Thats what kills you."

"I understand where Bill Maher is coming from when he says, basically, the world is destroying itself over a bunch of fairy tales about talking snakes and men who are alive inside fishes. Im very sympathetic to it, but at the same time, given the cosmos that were living in, its very persuasive, the idea that there is some kind of first cause thats running things. It might not be the god of Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, it might not be the god of al-Qaida, and it might not be the god of Abraham, but something very well could be running things. The order of the universe as we see it, the interlocking nature, and the way things work together, are persuasive of the idea that there may be some overarching first cause."

"My dad has hated me for as long as I can remember. Thats a pretty sweeping statement, and I know how phony it sounds. It sounds petulant and really fantastic, the kind of weapon kids always use when the old man wont come across with the car for your heavy date at the drive-in with Peggy Sue or when he tells you that if you flunk world history the second time through hes going to beat the living hell out of you. In this day and age when everybody thinks psychology is Gods gift to the poor old anally fixated human race and even the president of the United States pops a trank before dinner, its really a good way to get rid of those Old Testament guilts that keep creeping up our throats like the aftertaste of a bad meal we overate. If you say your father hated you as a kid, you can go out and flash the neighborhood, commit rape, or burn down the Knights of Pythias bingo parlor and still cop a plea. But it also means that no one will believe you if its true. Youre the little boy who cried wolf. And for me its true...I dont think Dad himself really knew it until then. Even if you could dig to the very bottom of his motives, hed probably say - at the most - that he was hating me for my own good."

"Ive made some things for you, Constant Reader; you see them laid out before you in the moonlight. But before you look at the little handcrafted treasures I have for sale, lets talk about them for a bit, shall we? It wont take long. Here, sit down beside me. And do come a little closer. I dont bite. Except ... weve known each other for a very long time, and I suspect you know thats not entirely true. Is it?"

"Now Art, used collectively for painting, sculpture, architecture and music, is the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation."

"The Good consists in the congruity of a thing with the laws of the reason and the nature of the will, and in its fitness to determine the latter to actualize the former: and it is always discursive. The Beautiful arises from the perceived harmony of an object, whether sight or sound, with the inborn and constitutive rules of the judgment and imagination: and it is always intuitive."

"I believe that the unity of man as opposed to other living things derives from the fact that man is the conscious life of himself. Man is conscious of himself, of his future, which is death, of his smallness, of his impotence; he is aware of others as others; man is in nature, subject to its laws even if he transcends it with his thought."

"Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flower Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet? God! let the torrents, like a shout of nations, Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God! God! sing, ye meadow-streams, with gladsome voice! Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds! And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow, And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God!"

"All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair — The bees are stirring — birds are on the wing — And Winter slumbering in the open air, Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring! And I the while, the sole unbusy thing, Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing."

"Taste is the intermediate faculty which connects the active with the passive powers of our nature, the intellect with the senses; and its appointed function is to elevate the images of the latter, while it realizes the ideas of the former."