“We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another.”
“There was a pause – just long enough for an angel to pass, flying slowly.”
Vainglory (1915), cited from The Complete Ronald Firbank (London: Duckworth, 1961) p. 117.
“No bird can ever fly / like a heart can rise so high”
Original: Il n'est oiseau qui sût voler / Si haut comme un coeur peut aller
Source: Quatrains, LXXXIV
"Hi Neigbour, Salam Neighbour"
For Whom The Troubadour Sings (2010)
Beautiful Losers (1966)
Context: What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.
UTI interview (2004)
Context: I think that most people, when faced with overwhelming facts, will come around. (I know I certainly have.) But it is definitely difficult to overcome people’s entrenched beliefs, so I feel that if I only convince people that the other side is a reasonable position to take, even if they themselves don’t take it, then I’ve been a success.
It is sort of a quixotic task in that sense, but it’s also useful to me by helping clarify my ideas.
When you say something particularly controversial on the Web, you’ll get all sorts of people coming at you with arguments. Considering those arguments and seeing if they’re right or, if they’re wrong, why they’re wrong, has been very valuable in clarifying my beliefs (and similarly, I hope my challenges have helped other people clarify their beliefs).
“Can I take advantage of you in the limo?” His eyes laughed at me. “By all means, angel mine.”
Source: Entwined with You
No. 80, preached at the funeral of Sir William Cokayne, December 12, 1626
LXXX Sermons (1640)
