“Collective tragedies are not always consolidated through silence or denial. Sometimes they take hold in a far subtler way: when we learn to live with them without allowing them to significantly alter our priorities, our forms of attention, or our sensitivity to the suffering of others.”

Source: Choke

"Society, Morality and the Novel" (1957), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), pp. 699-700.
Context: Perhaps the novel evolved in order to deal with man's growing awareness that behind the facade of social organisations, manners, customs, myths, rituals and religions of the post-Christian era lies chaos. Man knows, despite the certainties which it is the psychological function of his social institutions to give him, that he did not create the universe, and that the universe is not at all concerned with human values. Man knows that even in this day of marvelous technology and the tenuous subjugation of the atom, that nature can crush him, and that at the boundaries of human order the arts and the instruments of technology are hardly more than magic objects which serve to aid us in our ceaseless quest for certainty. We cannot live, as someone has said, in the contemplation of chaos, but neither can we live without an awareness of chaos, and the means through which we achieve that awareness, and through which we assert our humanity most significantly against it, is in great art. In our time the most articulate art form for defining ourselves and for asserting our humanity is the novel. Certainly it is our most rational art form for dealing with the irrational.

Source: Think Big (1996), p. 175

Source: Clockwork Angel

Hermann und Dorothea (1797)

11 April 1944
(1942 - 1944)

Source: The Summing Up (1938), p. 64

Variant: I think sometimes we are reckless with our hearts the way we are with our lives. When we give them away, we give every piece. And if we do not get what we so desperately need, how do we live?
Source: City of Heavenly Fire