10 Quotes by C.E. Morgan

What she was coming to realize, but what no woman was allowed to utter aloud, was that there was no guarantee your child would be adequate compensation for the life you gave up to have it. More and more, life looked an awful lot like a hoax perpetrated on women and designated to further men’s lives at the expense of their own.

The old poets knew all along: the wilderness has an awful tongue, which teaches doubt.

Only an animal visibly damages its mate.

We founded this nation under the illusory notion of independence, that a man’s life is entirely distinct from the life of his neighbor; that the poisons in his water have no bearing on the cleanliness of his neighbor’s water; that the suffering of a laborer has no direct relationship to the purchaser of goods; that animals are objects for sale; that the health of the land is divorced from the health of the collective. We’ve turned freedom from tyranny into freedom from each other.

Because there is hunger. Like any desire, it’s only temporarily satisfied, which calls into question the reliability of satisfaction and whether such a state can be said to exist at all. Anything we eat knows us more intimately than a lover. Not merely the inside of our mouth but the esophagus, stomach, alimentary canal, upper and lower colon, sphincter. Everything we desire, we shit out and leave behind.

Language is the charnel house of man.

Sanity begins with knowing your place.

The man’s brow was furrowed, and he said, “Why, I believe forgiveness and love are the same thing. Don’t you?

Ultimately, I want a peak experience in reading, and that is sometimes difficult to find in contemporary fiction. I’m not interested in books that are just clever and well executed; polish doesn’t impress me, and I don’t care about a merely capable sentence. Life is short; I want a confrontation with high art. I want soul. Great literature rattles the mind and makes the body sing. It’s an unmistakable, electric feeling, and too rare. That is what I want.